Sue Tilley was working in an unemployment office when she met the artist Lucian Freud. The paintings he made of her in the 1990s are now among the most famous in modern art, and the most valuable. Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, regarded as one of Freud’s masterpieces, is now going up for sale at Sotheby’s on June 24, with a presale estimate of $33 million to $47 million, per the AP. Tilley hasn’t seen any of the millions that the portraits have fetched at auction, but she doesn’t regret a thing. “It did change my life,” she says. “Who would have thought I’d be in Sotheby’s?”
Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, painted in 1996, is the last of Freud’s four monumental portraits of Tilley reclining, resting, or dozing. An earlier painting, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sold at auction in 2008 for $33.6 million, at the time a record for a living artist. “I was thrilled I was in the Guinness book of records,” says the 69-year-old Tilley. “Unfortunately, it didn’t say my name. There was a picture and it said ‘Benefits Supervisor.’ But I was still thrilled.”
Freud, a grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, is famed for fleshy nudes of friends, family, and even himself. He slathered oil paint to capture his subjects’ mottled skin tones in portraits that are both unsparing and warm. He even painted Queen Elizabeth II, though fully clothed. By the time of his 2011 death at age 88, he was the most acclaimed British portrait painter of the 20th century. His reputation has only grown since. Another picture of Tilley, Benefits Supervisor Resting, was auctioned in 2015 for $56.2 million. In 2022, his painting Large Interior, W11 sold for more than $86 million.
Tilley met Freud through her friend Leigh Bowery, the late Australian performance artist, who also posed for the painter. Each portrait was the product of months of work. “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet … was the most comfortable one, because I was sitting up in a chair,” Tilley says. “Lying down on the sofa looks comfortable, but after a while it got a bit painful.” She also says she doesn’t regret that Freud never left her one of the paintings, as her place in art history is secure. It’s “thrilling for me that I’ve achieved my ambition without really knowing it,” she notes. More here.
