As if Lucian Freud’s pale, pasty, naked people weren’t freaky enough painted solo, Sunny Morning Eight Legs adds a dog to what might be the wind-up of a zoophilic orgy.

Or you know, maybe it’s a totally normal scene of a man sleeping in the nude with his doggy...with a serial killer or murder victim’s legs peeping out ominously from underneath the bed. You decide!

But seriously…here’s the skinny on this skinny dog-pile. The model and his pup are long-known buds of Freud’s, his assistant David and his little Whippet. Their heads loll back in the kind of stupor that a deep, comfortable slumber brings. The bent knees of David are echoed in reverse underneath the bed. These phantom, fragmented legs sinisterly pierce the otherwise sweet, sleepy image.

Freud claims that he usually catches a moment as opposed to composing it. But in this case, he said: “Oh, the spare legs came about out of desperation, as things quite often do in my pictures.” Which means that the legs were added simply because something felt amiss. Something that only a creepy pair of dismembered limbs could fix, apparently. 

The legs below are modeled after David's, too. It’s all a bit Freudian in the Sigmund sense if you ask me. The granddaddy of psychotherapy (and of Lucian) would’ve approved of interpreting this image as akin to his iceberg model of the mind. On the top, uncovered and vulnerable is a representation of David’s Ego. And buried underneath the bed, the partly exposed legs seem like the uncontrollable Id that forces its way out...crying for coffee.