Artist Lucian Freud leaves $156 million in will: paper

LONDON (Reuters) - Portrait painter Lucian Freud left a record 96 million pounds ($156 million) in his will, the largest sum bequeathed by a British artist, the Mail on Sunday newspaper reported.

Freud died in July last year aged 88, by which time his uncompromising, fleshy portraits had made him one of the world's most revered and coveted artists, whose subjects ranged from England's Queen Elizabeth II to the supermodel Kate Moss.

His "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping", a 1995 portrait of an obese woman asleep in the nude on a sofa, fetched $33.6 million at Christie's in 2008, an auction record for a living artist.

Freud left 2.5 million pounds and a house, the paper said, to his long-term assistant, David Dawson, who is pictured in Freud's last unfinished work "Portrait of the Hound", which also featured the artist's pet whippet Eli.

Representatives of Freud in Britain and the United States were not immediately available for comment on Sunday.

The remainder of the estate was left to his lawyer Diana Rawstron and one of his daughters, Rose Pearce, who are identified as trustees in Freud's will and are instructed to dispose of his personal possessions in line with wishes expressed during the artist's life, the newspaper reported.

Freud, the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, married twice and had several children, although he was widely believed to have fathered many more than he acknowledged.

($1 = 0.6159 British pounds)

(Reporting by David Milliken; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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