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

London — 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.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/30/style/su … ys-auction