LONDON (AP) — 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 going up for sale at Sotheby’s on June 24, with a presale estimate of 25 million pounds to 35 million pounds ($33 million to $47 million).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,” Tilley told The Associated Press as she sat in front of the 7 ½-foot (2.3-meter)-high nude image of herself in the auction house showroom. “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,’” said 69-year-old Tilley, who has a rich laugh and an air of delight at the twists her life has taken. “Unfortunately, it didn’t say my name. There was a picture and it said ‘Benefits Supervisor.’ But I was still thrilled that it was there.”
When Sue Tilley met Lucian Freud, it changed her life. Now a painting of her could fetch $47 million
Sue Tilley was working in an unemployment office when she met artist Lucian Freud. His paintings of her in the 1990s are now famous, and very valuable.
Lucian Freud's 1996 portrait "Sleeping by the Lion Carpet" goes to Sotheby's on June 24 with a presale estimate of £25–35 million ($33–47M), from the collection of billionaire Joe Lewis. The sale signals sustained institutional demand for 20th-century figurative painting at trophy-asset prices, with Freud's market consistently setting new records since his death in 2011.






