Madonna, Courtney Love, and Kate Moss are among her clientele, and they, in turn, admire the designers’s unconventionally stylish knitwear, tailored and slinky suits, and classic English lines – but with a dash of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll thrown in. She is Bella Freud, and yes, she’s one of those Freuds.  Her great-grandfather was Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and her father, Lucien, is considered by many to be the greatest British artist of his time.  Despite the different generations, the famous Freuds loved dogs, and it seems that most, if not all of them, were purebred dogs.

Lucian Freud’s whippet Eli in front of the artist’s last painting photographed three months before his death. Photograph: David Dawson/Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery from this article: http://v.ht/6WRt

Though Sigmund Freud didn’t own dogs until he was in his seventies, he took to them in a very big way after his daughter, Anna, brought a German Shepherd Dog home to keep her company (though other accounts say he bought the dog for her). Freud was soon to get his own dog, a Chow Chow named “Lün-Yu,” a gift from Dorothy Burlingham, a close friend of Anna’s. Sadly, Lün-Yu was hit and killed by a train at only 15 months of age. When Sigmund’s grief subsided seven months later, he felt emotionally able to accept “Jofi,” Lün-Yu’s sister, into his home. Freud included Jofi as a mute assistant in his psychoanalysis sessions. He felt that dogs had an uncanny ability to evaluate a person’s character, and paid attention to JoFi’s silent signals (the dog stayed near calm patients, but steered clear of tense ones). It’s said that Jo-Fi even sensed when the hour long session was over by getting up and moving to the door at precisely the right time.

Sigmund’s grandson, Lucian, also owned a number of dogs in the course of his life, but Whippets became the best known of them, largely because they were often the subjects of his painting and drawings. The last painting that Freud created before his death was of his assistant and close friend, David Dawson, alongside Dawson’s Whippet, Eli who’d been given to Dawson by Freud (as aside, Freud’s first painting that included a dog was Girl with a White Dog, the “dog” being a Bull Terrier given to Freud and his model/wife, Kitty Garman, as a wedding present).

As it happens, Bella Freud’s Whippet, “Pluto,” was the great, great-uncle of Dawson’s dog, “Eli,” and it was Pluto whom Lucien sketched when creating a logo for Bella’s fashions. Though it’s a simple line drawing, we think Sigmund might have chuckled at the suggestion that sometimes a Whippet is just a Whippet.

If you see a Bella Freud design, you now know the story behind her label.