The woman in Lucian Freud's $39 million portrait was alive to watch herself become history

“Mona Lisa wasn’t alive when she became famous—but I am.”

It is a killer opening line, delivered with the kind of nonchalance you can only pull off when your naked body has just triggered a $39 million bidding war at Sotheby’s London. When Lucian Freud’s 1995-96 canvas, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, hit the auction block, the art world did exactly what it always does by treating a piece of canvas like high-stakes real estate.

Meanwhile, the actual woman depicted on that canvas, 69-year-old Sue Tilley, was busy watching the livestream from a supper club at a seaside art space, completely unfazed by the madness surrounding her likeness.

The juxtaposition between the subject and the creator is spectacular. On one side, you have the intimidating pedigree of the artist himself. Lucian Freud was a legend in London’s elite art circles and the grandson of Sigmund Freud, inheriting a knack for peering ruthlessly into the human psyche.

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When he met Tilley in 1992, he was a 70-year-old master whose eyes would bore into her over lunch. She, by contrast, was a 35-year-old job centre supervisor who moonlighted as a nightclub cashier. She did not look like a traditional museum pin-up, and she did not care to be one. She agreed to take her clothes off and sprawl on his studio floor for nine months at a time, mostly because he was funny, adventurous, and bought her nice food.

The price of free modelling

The economy of this collaboration is where the culture writer's brain starts to itch. Freud initially paid her a modest £20 a day, eventually raising it to £33 so he could capture her in natural daylight. Decades later, the cumulative market value of the four portraits he painted of her stands at a staggering $129 million.

In the grand, unequal tradition of the fine art market, muses are never eligible for royalties. Tilley does not see a dime of that $39 million, nor has she ever been invited by the billionaire collectors who trade her likeness to see the paintings hanging in their private mansions.

Looking past the absurd wealth formatting of modern auctions reveals the real triumph here. Freud’s style was brutally honest, rejecting the sanitised, airbrushed perfection we are bombarded with today. Tilley admits that seeing her unvarnished, voluptuous reflection for the first time was difficult because she felt grotesque and once even overheard a gallery-goer claim the artist must hate women to paint her mottled skin so ruthlessly.

Vulnerability in a curated world

History, and Tilley herself, ultimately got the last laugh. Critics now view those paintings in sculptural, monumental terms, cementing her as one of the defining faces of 20th-century portraiture.

Decades after her modelling days ended, Sotheby's even invited her back to their Bond Street location just before the auction. They set up a replica of the original Portobello Road market rug Freud used in his studio, and Tilley happily agreed to pose next to her multi-million-dollar likeness, thoroughly amused by the full-circle moment.