London
It took 4 males to heave the 200-pound portray on the wall. Once mounted, the voluptuous nude physique stands tall like a mountain in opposition to the pale wash of Sotheby’s London gallery. There are 5 or 6 folks within the room, together with the hangers and the auction home press crew, who coo and aw over the sleeping girl on the canvas, her blue-tinged flesh erupting in folds. Suddenly, a jolly voice with an east London twang cuts via the mesmerized whispers: “Hello,” says a a lot smaller girl on the again of the room: “I’m here in real life!”
Sue Tilley, the 60-something retired advantages supervisor and topic of British artist Lucian Freud’s monumental portray “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” (1996), has travelled from her dwelling in St Leonards-on-sea on the south coast of England for an uncanny assembly with the oil-on-canvas work earlier than it heads to auction subsequent month. The portrait, which Sotheby’s Europe chairman Olivier Barker says is “the magnum opus of Lucian’s work,” is estimated to fetch between £25-35 million ($33-45 million) on the Lewis Collection sale on 24 June.
Tilley is effectively conscious of these lofty value tags, of course, although that’s about so far as it goes. “It feels very weird, because I never really got any money,” she mentioned whereas sitting throughout from her imposing portrait. “I think sometimes I’m probably worth about £100 million,” she laughed. “How shocking is that!”
Do you are feeling in management of your picture?
She posed for the seminal painter, who died in 2011, quite a few occasions within the Nineties and was paid a modest day fee. (“People think I walked in the room and went ‘Wow, let’s work on the most expensive painting in the world.’ It wasn’t like that at all.”) Together, they created 4 portraits: “Evening in the Studio” (1993), “Benefits Supervisor Resting” (1994), “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” (1995) and “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet.” Two have damaged data with their sale value: First the 1995 portrait, which offered in 2008 at Christie’s in New York for $33.6 million and have become the costliest work by a residing artist. Then in 2015 the proverbial yardstick was thrown like a javelin, after the 1994 portray offered, additionally at Christie’s in New York, for $56.2 million.
Freud and Tilley have been first launched by a mutual buddy, Leigh Bowery — the trailblazing Australian efficiency artist, costume designer and membership child who moved to London as a youngster hellbent on experiencing the nightlife and tradition he examine in magazines. Tilley was a detailed buddy of Bowery’s after assembly whereas out clubbing, and in 2025 wrote his biography. “He made a name for himself as being very outrageous,” she mentioned. “But deep down he was a very normal person.” Freud in the meantime was all for staying shut to London’s avant-garde scene, “the ticking heart of what was really going on in London at that particular moment in time,” mentioned Barker. He painted Bowery, Tilley and a legion of their nightclub crew. Tilley specifically, “completed something that (Freud) needed of his models,” Barker added.
It was “a fantastic experience,” Tilley mentioned, as they chewed the fats on the whole lot from life and pleasant gossip to horse racing. But sitting for the grasp painter wasn’t with out complication or discomfort. For one, she had by no means posed nude earlier than. Nervous about what to count on from the primary session, Bowery came visiting to her place and “made me strip my clothes off so I could practice.” Bowery’s directions (“you have to do this, you have to do that,”) put “the fear of God” in Tilley. But when she met Freud she instinctively did her personal factor. “I think that’s why he liked me,” she mentioned. “I disobeyed him the whole time.” Still, the schedule was strict. Tilley would arrive round 7:30am, be given breakfast, after which the portray started. Freud hardly ever took breaks, in order that Tilley could be “thrilled” when the telephone rang within the studio in order to have a couple of moments to pause. Sometimes, she drifted off whereas posing and would even dream Freud had given her a couple of minutes off. She’d get up and rise to her ft earlier than being instructed off. In the top, he typically relented, “so it worked,” she mentioned.
She’s usually been referred to as Freud’s muse — a phrase Tilley has come to loath: “I always think of a wafty kind of girl in love with the artist sniffing smelling salts because she was about to pass out.” That was by no means Tilley. The susceptible nudes have been painted in the course of the excessive occasions of excessive thinness, outlined by fashions such Kate Moss who embodied the “heroin chic” aesthetic.
What was it like to sit for Lucian Freud?
Tilley once said she hated this explicit portrait for making her “look awful.” Standing in entrance of it once more years later, does she really feel otherwise? “I think I’ve gotten used to it now. I am what I am,” she mentioned. “Imagine if everyone wants to be stick thin, it’d be boring, wouldn’t it?” But 30 years later we’re residing within the age of Ozempic, the place the collective goal appears to be simply that. “You have to have all different shapes and sizes in the world for something to look at,” Tilley mentioned. “I always think I’m a help to fat women. They go, ‘Well if she can strip off naked, so can I.’” But, she mentioned, Freud beloved to exaggerate. “I haven’t really got a big brown lump at the bottom of my stomach, in real life it’s not there.” He layered imperfections, too. “If he found a blemish he’d paint it, but then they come and go… You got another blemish, he’d paint that as well, but not rub the other one out.” The closing work ultimately is part-her, part-fiction. “It’s like someone else,” she mentioned. “And they’re so familiar, but unfamiliar at the same time.”
With a brand new bidding struggle quick approaching over Tilley’s physique, whether or not “Sleeping by the Lion’s Carpet” will surpass estimations and set one other file for Freud’s oeuvre stays to be seen — however the auction home is hopeful. “This is a real one-off, and I literally hand on heart can’t tell you when the next opportunity will be,” mentioned Barker. “I think there are collectors who will know that and will respond as a result.”
So far, Freud’s portraits of Tilley have largely ended up in personal collections: particularly these of Roman Abramovich, the billionaire proprietor of the British soccer membership Chelsea, and Joe Lewis, the previous proprietor of the Tottenham Hotspur who now has the membership in a household belief. In this subsequent spherical of auction, who would she select to be the brand new custodian of, effectively, her? “I’d like someone who’d really love it for what it was, and not for money,” she mentioned. “They’re just hidden away in cupboards, making money for people. That’s horrible. At least if you could give it to a gallery, so people could watch and look at it.”
“Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” (1996) is on view totally free at Sotheby’s in London starting June 10.
Correction:
This article has been up to date to mirror the present possession standing of the Tottenham Hotspur membership.