Arnold Goodman, Lord Goodman (1913–1995), was ‘the greatest negotiator of the age.’ He was a solicitor, erstwhile political advisor and earned a reputation for his talents as a dealmaker. He was made a life peer in 1965 and sat in the House of Lords as a crossbencher. He later filled a multitude of administrative roles in public arts organisations such as the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Royal College of Art. In Goodman’s own estimation, in the eighties he became ‘a very close friend’ of Lucian Freud. They first encountered one another in the sixties amongst the rarefied social circle of their mutual friend Ann Fleming. But Freud showed no interest in him as a portrait subject until Goodman had acquired the characterful expressions of advanced age. He was in his seventy-seventh year when he first sat for Freud in 1985. Over three years from 1985 to 1987, Goodman sat for at least two charcoal drawings, one pastel and this etching. Goodman wrote about his initial sittings for Freud in a diary piece for the London Review of Books, and the issue in question carried Freud’s drawing of Goodman on its front cover: […] a very great artist—who has now in a sensationally short space of time become a very close friend—unexpectedly asked if I would like to be drawn by him. […] The drawing process consisted of Lucian arriving at my home at what for me was the middle of the night, usually about 8.30 a.m. My bleary-eyed housekeeper would admit him, and the difficulties associated with bathing, shaving and dressing at that hour were summarily solved by a decision that he would draw me in bed in my pyjamas, unshaved and unbathed, before a single brush or lotion had been applied to the untouched exterior. […] He appears at the moment to have assigned me as his time-off model when he has nothing else to draw. Hence on departing, usually around 11 in the morning, he will make arrangements to come back in the next two or three days […]. These unusual circumstances explain the unusually dishevelled appearance of Goodman in this etching. Lord Goodman in his Yellow Pyjamas depicts a man still emerging from the throes of sleep. His hair is askew, his eyes unfocused, his manner reposed and his pyjamas apparently coming apart at the chest. His features are illuminated from below by bright directional light, probably that of an electric lamp, which comes from the left and gives every crease of skin an emphatic quality. At sittings for the etching, Goodman apparently reminded Freud of W. H. Auden’s line: ‘Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places.’ It presumably appealed to Freud that such a distinguished man should be portrayed in such a revealing, uncontrived fashion. The inclusion of hand-applied yellow watercolour in Lord Goodman in his Yellow Pyjamas is a unique instance in Freud’s oeuvre. None of his other editioned works included colour or hand finishing. The yellow watercolour additions are of the palest kind and change the print into a form of tinted drawing. The significance of the yellow pyjamas was first established in a pastel of 1986/87, which directly preceded the etching that Freud made in 1987. The strong colour of these garments was a memorable aspect of the pastel. In Freud’s hands, etching became a form of drawing. He worked from a life model and used a needle to scrape the plate directly, replicating the arrangement he used when painting or drawing. As with brush marks in his painting, Freud’s etched line is charged with formal intensity, and the lines are frequently used simultaneously to describe the shape of the form and to create effects of modelling (of shadow, mid-tone, etc.). In the area around Lord Goodman’s chin, the complex interaction of hatching and cross-hatching at once suggests the play of light and the morphology of the subject.