What it’s like to have your nude body auctioned for tens of millions

By Leah Dolan, CNN

London (CNN) — It took four men to heave the 200-pound painting on the wall. Once mounted, the voluptuous nude body stands tall like a mountain against the pale wash of Sotheby’s London gallery. There are five or six people in the room, including the hangers and the auction house press team, who coo and aw over the sleeping woman on the canvas, her blue-tinged flesh erupting in folds. Suddenly, a jolly voice with an east London twang cuts through the mesmerized whispers: “Hello,” says a much smaller woman at the back of the room: “I’m here in real life!”

Sue Tilley, the 60-something retired benefits supervisor and subject of British artist Lucian Freud’s monumental painting “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” (1996), has travelled from her home in St Leonards-on-sea on the south coast of England for an uncanny meeting with the oil-on-canvas work before it heads to auction next 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) at the Lewis Collection sale on 24 June.

Tilley is well aware of these lofty price tags, of course, though that’s about as far as it goes. “It feels very weird, because I never really got any money,” she said while sitting across from her imposing portrait. “I think sometimes I’m probably worth about £100 million,” she laughed. “How shocking is that!”

She posed for the seminal painter, who died in 2011, numerous times in the 1990s and was paid a modest day rate. (“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 four portraits: “Evening in the Studio” (1993), “Benefits Supervisor Resting” (1994), “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” (1995) and “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet.” Two have broken records with their sale price: First the 1995 portrait, which sold in 2008 at Christie’s in New York for $33.6 million and became the most expensive work by a living artist. Then in 2015 the proverbial yardstick was thrown like a javelin, after the 1994 painting sold, also at Christie’s in New York, for $56.2 million.

Freud and Tilley were first introduced by a mutual friend, Leigh Bowery — the trailblazing Australian performance artist, costume designer and club kid who moved to London as a teenager hellbent on experiencing the nightlife and culture he read about in magazines. Tilley was a close friend of Bowery’s after meeting while out clubbing, and in 2025 wrote his biography. “He made a name for himself as being very outrageous,” she said. “But deep down he was a very normal person.” Freud meanwhile was interested in staying close to London’s avant-garde scene, “the ticking heart of what was really going on in London at that particular moment in time,” said Barker. He painted Bowery, Tilley and a legion of their nightclub crew. Tilley in particular, “completed something that (Freud) needed of his models,” Barker added.

It was “a fantastic experience,” Tilley said, as they chewed the fat on everything from life and friendly gossip to horse racing. But sitting for the master painter wasn’t without complication or discomfort. For one, she had never posed nude before. Nervous about what to expect from the first session, Bowery came over to her place and “made me strip my clothes off so I could practice.” Bowery’s instructions (“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 own thing. “I think that’s why he liked me,” she said. “I disobeyed him the whole time.” Still, the schedule was strict. Tilley would arrive around 7:30am, be given breakfast, and then the painting began. Freud rarely took breaks, so that Tilley would be “thrilled” when the phone rang in the studio so as to have a few moments to pause. Sometimes, she drifted off while posing and would even dream Freud had given her a few minutes off. She’d wake up and rise to her feet before being told off. In the end, he often relented, “so it worked,” she said.

She’s regularly been referred to as Freud’s muse — a word 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 never Tilley. The vulnerable nudes were painted during the high times of extreme thinness, defined by models such Kate Moss who embodied the “heroin chic” aesthetic.

Tilley once said she hated this particular portrait for making her “look awful.” Standing in front of it again years later, does she feel differently? “I think I’ve gotten used to it now. I am what I am,” she said. “Imagine if everyone wants to be stick thin, it’d be boring, wouldn’t it?” But 30 years later we’re living in the age of Ozempic, where the collective aim seems to be just that. “You have to have all different shapes and sizes in the world for something to look at,” Tilley said. “I always think I’m a help to fat women. They go, ‘Well if she can strip off naked, so can I.’” But, she said, Freud loved 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 final work in the end is part-her, part-fiction. “It’s like someone else,” she said. “And they’re so familiar, but unfamiliar at the same time.”

With a new bidding war fast approaching over Tilley’s body, whether “Sleeping by the Lion’s Carpet” will surpass estimations and set another record for Freud’s oeuvre remains to be seen — but the auction house is hopeful. “This is a real one-off, and I literally hand on heart can’t tell you when the next opportunity will be,” said 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 private collections: specifically those of Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of the British football club Chelsea, and Joe Lewis, the former owner of the Tottenham Hotspur who now has the club in a family trust. In this next round of auction, who would she choose to be the new custodian of, well, her? “I’d like someone who’d really love it for what it was, and not for money,” she said. “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 for free at Sotheby’s in London beginning June 10.

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