Naked truth about women on the canvas

The big artistic news of the week was that the public has gone off drowned women and is now obsessed with nipples and dogs. Sales of reproduction postcards from the shops at the Tate galleries operate as a rough census of national cultural taste. And, during 2002, Sir John Everett Millais's Ophelia - an 1851 painting of the drowning scene from Hamlet - was pushed under into second place by Lucian Freud's Girl With White Dog.

This is intriguing, but what's startling - and would have kept Freud's famous grandfather in fees in Vienna for weeks - is that, just behind the rush of customers for Ophelia and Girl, were people wanting versions of John W Waterhouse's Lady Of Shallot, in which another woman drifts downriver to her death.

So think about this. The images which those leaving Britain's major modern galleries are keenest to take with them as a souvenir are as follows: first, Kitty Epstein, first wife of Lucian Freud, curls on a mattress, with a bull terrier nuzzling her lap while her right breast spills out of her yellow dressing gown; then, the lover of a Danish prince asphyxiates herself in a river; finally, a tragic aristocrat floats to her own slaughter by water.

At least Tate customers' favourite images of women have gone from them lying down drowned to them sitting up showing a breast to a bull terrier. This may be taken as a small victory for feminism. Yet the images are all so bleak. Even the one living female in the trio, the former Mrs Freud, looks apprehensive, and the dog may be taken as her protector. I disagree with those who think that Lucian Freud is a mysogynistic painter (although he certainly can be a lascivious one) but his women,especially in the early work, rarely seem in control of their image. And both Millais and Waterhouse painted mythical females who, through Shakespeare and Tennyson, became tragic victims.

So you have to wonder at this fascination with feminine misery and vulnerability. Who is buying all these postcards of dipped chicks and dog-women? Neither of the explanations is very appetising. Either the sales graph is accounted for by men with a perception of women as bleak and tragic creatures or by women of the same opinion. Perhaps this postcard poll confirms the evidence in anecdotes and the plots of romantic comedies: that people frequently go to art galleries as solace when love affairs have ended.

But, beyond its revelations about the national psyche and attitude to women, the Tate 10 also has artistic interest. This cash-till list shows the traditional bias towards the figurative and, indeed, the peopled. Seventy per cent of the favoured works include the human form and Barbara Hepworth's Stringed Figure is recognisably a bird, with a subtitle helpfully directing the viewer to the curlew.

The strange drunkard's/ dreamer's mess of images in Patrick Caulfield's 1975 painting After Lunch sways between representation and abstraction but has a standard human figure in it. That old prejudice that holiday snaps are more interesting if they have people in them still seems to be applied by many to art. The only completely abstract canvas in the most-loved reproductions - Bridget Riley's multi-colour patchwork Nataraja - scrapes in at number 10 and purchases may be boosted by its Hindu spiritual associations.

Yet, while these are in no way postcards from the edge, the fact that a Freud nude has claimed first place does suggest a shift in taste, a small retreat from sexual and artistic conservatism. After all, the two things that people are most likely to do with postcards bought in art galleries are to pin them up in their kitchens and studies or use them for brief notes to friends and family. That a nude might be widely used for these purposes indicates the end of a taboo. And, while Freud's presence in the charts is exaggerated by the recent major exhibition at the Tate - so this is, in some ways, a Freudian blip - it's more interesting to be living in a country which loves the naked portraits of a living painter than one which reveres Turner sunrises.

It's also worth observing, though against my own interests as an arts journalist, that Freud, almost alone among major modern figures in the arts, has refused to cooperate with publicity. It's true that painting differs from other art forms in that you only need to persuade one person to hand over their money (a system which doesn't work for novelists, playwrights or film-makers), but there's still something dignified and impressive about the way that this artist has let the work speak for itself and at the answer which seems this year to be coming from the public.

There is, admittedly, the horrible possibility that the popularity of Girl With White Dog is accounted for by the combination of two all-too-traditional British markets: hormonal schoolboys who buy it for the knocker, and ladies from the shires who like the look of the dog. But, in this season of theoretical goodwill, let's prefer to think that the sales figures from the Tate send us a rather more cheery postcard about our attitudes to modern art.