The subject of an auction-bound Lucian Freud nude portrait may be asleep, but the painter’s market is wide awake and keenly watching the rare lot.
Titled Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, the painting could fetch between £25 million and £35 million ($33.4 million to $46.8 million) when it hits the block on June 24 at Sotheby’s in London—to the astonishment of its subject, Sussex resident Sue Tilley. The model and frequent Freud muse told BBC Radio Sussex that she was “flummoxed” by the market fervor. “I can’t quite believe it’s happening,” she said.
According to Tilley, she met Freud “by luck” in 1993 through a mutual acquaintance, the fashion designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery, one of Freud’s most celebrated sitters, who had already appeared in a series of striking nude portraits—thickly painted studies of dimpled, mottled flesh flowing over bone. Freud held famously unhurried sessions, often requiring sitters to spend unbroken hours in the studio over the course of days or even months. As a result, many subjects were depicted reclining or seated; some, like Tilley, who worked nights and posed for Freud during the day, simply snoozed.
Tilley, who hails from St. Leonards, East Sussex, recalled the experience of sitting for Freud as “very pleasant,” while noting, with apparent amusement, that she was not “a nudist as such.” Freud’s unflinching depiction of her naked body—a Baroque topography of colliding, dramatically shadowed folds—reportedly took longer to embrace.
“I think I’ve gotten used to it now. I am what I am,” she told the BBC. “Imagine if everyone wanted to be stick-thin. It’d be boring, wouldn’t it?”
For his part, Freud explained his fascination with the human form in direct terms: “Skin is not inanimate,” he said. “It’s a living material.”
Sotheby’s described Sleeping by the Lion Carpet as “the final and most ambitious work in [Freud’s] celebrated quartet of monumental portraits of Sue” and noted the rarity of its appearance at auction: the last work from the series to come under the hammer was sold in 2015, setting a record for a living artist at £35.9 million. For most of its existence, the quartet has remained tucked away in private collections, including that of Russian billionaire collector Roman Abramovich.
It would be ideal, Tilly said, if Lion was bought by someone “who’d really love it for what it was, and not for money”. She added: “At least if you could give it to a gallery, so people could look at it.”
