Seminal Lucian Freud Painting Comes to Auction for the First Time
By Richard Whiddington
Last month, Sotheby’s said that it would offer the most valuable collection of art ever to come to auction in the United Kingdom this coming June in London: 50 lots from the storied collection of the billionaire businessman Joe Lewis.
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Over the past four decades, Lewis assembled a collection of figurative painting that includes examples by Gustav Klimt, Amedeo Modigliani, Francis Bacon, and Leon Kossoff, which will all come to the block during an evening sale on June 24 and a day sale on June 25. Now a 51st lot will join them: Lucian Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995–96), which heads to auction for the first time with an estimate of £25 million to £35 million ($34 million to $47 million), pushing the collection’s total estimate north of £150 million ($202 million).
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The unflinching and imposing piece is the last of four canvases Freud painted in the mid-1990s of Sue Tilley, a London job center worker, that forms part of his “Benefits Supervisor” series.
Lucian Freud, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995–96), with the painting’s sitter Sue Tilley. Photo courtesy Sotheby’s.
Freud was introduced to Tilley in 1990 through the legendary queer performance artist Leigh Bowery, and she became one of his most striking yet enigmatic sitters. In Lewis’s picture, Freud captures Tilley simultaneously at ease and deeply vulnerable, posing and unguarded, exaggerated and human. Behind her, a carpet that the artist snapped up at a West London flea market depicts lions on the prowl, lending the work a surreal quality and a pop of vivid blue.
“Freud looks at Sue Tilley with something like astonishment, stripping away centuries of idealization to rediscover the human form in all its raw immediacy,” Tom Eddison, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, said in a statement.
In typical Freud fashion, he painted Tilley at a snail’s pace, building up folds of flesh with an almost sculptural intensity over the course of nine months. At times, the speed grated on Tilley. Could he not paint the floorboards or the savannah scene in her absence? Freud declined. “I need your aura, your presence affects everything,” he told her. “The color of your skin affects the floorboards, it’s all connected.”
Freud’s slow and intense mode of painting has arguably affected his market, creating a virtuous circle whereby the limited supply of his monumental portraits mean that they make an almighty splash whenever one comes to market.
The artist’s current auction record is $86 million, set at Christie’s New York in 2022, for a family portrait, Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau), from 1981–83.
Lucian Freud, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), on view at Christie’s London. Photo: Cate Gillon / Getty Images.
Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) briefly held the record for the most-expensive work ever sold by a living artist at auction, when Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch and one-time owner of Chelsea Football Club, acquired it for $33.6 million at Christie’s in 2008. The figure was surpassed by another Tilly canvas, Benefits Supervisor Resting (1994), which sold for $56.2 million at Christie’s in 2015, the last time a work from the series has appeared at auction. In 1999, Lewis bought another Tilley, Evening in the Studio (1993), for $2.4 million.
Lewis, who was pardoned for insider trading by President Donald J. Trump last year, began collecting the work of his fellow Londoner in the mid-1990s, at a time when Freud’s market was just beginning to rise. In 1992, Freud had left his long-time dealer James Kirkman for William Acquavella, who quickly succeeded in introducing the artist to U.S., Asian, and Middle Eastern collectors.
Three other Freuds have been put forward from the Lewis Collection, including Blond Girl on a Bed (1987), which sold for £7.4 million ($9.9 million) back in March at Sotheby’s, but Sleeping by the Lion Carpet is the most significant to come from his holdings. It was bought in 1996 through Acquavella, albeit only after a bit of strong-arming. The New York dealer had sworn off selling Lewis any more Freuds but relented after the businessman began negotiating directly with the artist (reportedly offering him a stake in one of his horses).
The portrait of Tilley has appeared in every major museum survey of the artist’s work since, including “New Perspectives” at London’s National Gallery in 2022, which primed the market for the record-breaking sale of Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) months later.
This article was originally published by Artnet News.
