When Sue Tilley first trudged up the three flights of stairs to Lucian Freud’s Paddington studio in 1991, she was a benefits supervisor at the Charing Cross Jobcentre and a cashier at Taboo, Leigh Bowery’s legendary club night. She had no training as an artist’s model and no connections in the fine art world. His 1995 canvas of her naked on a sofa, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sold at Christie’s New York in May 2008 for $33.6 million – then a world record for a work by a living artist. In 2015, four years after Freud’s death, a companion piece, Benefits Supervisor Resting, fetched $56.2 million. A third work, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, is due at Sotheby’s on 24 June with an estimate of £25 million to £35 million. Tilley’s combined “value” across the four paintings and etchings now exceeds £100 million on paper. She was paid £33 a day for the sittings. She was not invited to the 2008 auction. “How can that be possible when I’ve never got any money myself?” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in May, with the rich laugh that everyone who meets her mentions.
A Body Without Muscle
Freud, who died in 2011 at eighty-eight, was the grandson of Sigmund Freud and the son of Ernst Freud, the architect. He fled Berlin for London in 1933 and, by the early 1950s, had abandoned the sharp linearity of his youth in favour of a thick, impasto-heavy technique that treated human flesh as a terrain to be excavated rather than a surface to be flattered. The critic William Grider described the painter’s mature method as “a kind of geological survey of the body – layer upon layer of paint laid down until the surface has the density and weight of lived experience.” Freud worked from life, often requiring hundreds of hours of sitting, and was known to reduce models to tears with his demands for stillness and concentration.
It was through Leigh Bowery – the Australian performance artist whose outrageous costumes and club-night antics made him a fixture of 1980s London – that Tilley entered Freud’s world. Bowery was already modelling for the painter when, in Tilley’s account, he “decided I should too, so he put the idea into Lucian’s head.” Freud arranged a lunch for a group of people at the River Café in Hammersmith. “I could feel his eyes on me all the time,” Tilley told the art historian Ruth Millington, “except when he was telling a raucous joke about a masturbating whale. I must have passed the test as he then asked me to sit for him.”
What followed was a nine-month ordeal of sittings, three times a week, for the painting that would become Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. Freud called her “Big Sue” and spoke of her body with a kind of rapturous clinical detachment. “It’s flesh without muscle,” he said, “and it has developed a different kind of texture through bearing such a weight-bearing thing.” The remark, preserved in the exhibition catalogue for Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012, is characteristic of Freud’s approach: anatomical, precise, and entirely devoid of sentimentality or prurience.
The Routine of Sittings
Tilley has spoken candidly about the daily reality of posing. “To be honest it was just like going to work,” she told ArtDependence in 2018. “Once I had gotten over the first hurdle of taking my clothes off, each day followed more or less the same pattern. I would climb up three flights of stairs to his studio, we would have a chat, he’d give me something delicious to eat and then we’d start work. The first session could last up to 90 minutes until I had a break, but after that I would get more regular breaks. He would either cook lunch or take me to a fancy restaurant and then we’d carry on for a couple more hours.”
The sittings for Sleeping by the Lion Carpet were, Tilley says, “the most comfortable one, because I was sitting up in a chair. Lying down on the sofa looks comfortable, but after a while it got a bit painful.” The paintings are monumental in scale – Benefits Supervisor Sleeping measures 151.3 by 219 centimetres – and the physical demands of maintaining stillness for that long, under Freud’s relentless gaze, were considerable. “We used to chat while we were working,” she recalled. “Sometimes he’d make me laugh so much I almost fell off the sofa.”
The relationship had its sharp edges. Tilley later revealed that Freud “dropped her as a friend after taking offence at an offhand remark she made.” The only mementos of the works that Freud gave her were etchings, which she sold when short of money. “He could be kind, be horrible, be generous, be mean, be funny, be grumpy, be childish, be old,” she told ArtDependence. “But mainly he just loved to work.”
The Auction Phenomenon
The sale of Benefits Supervisor Sleeping on 13 May 2008 at Christie’s was a watershed moment in the contemporary art market. The painting was acquired after fierce bidding by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch and Chelsea Football Club owner, for $33.6 million – almost $10 million above its high estimate. The price shattered the previous record for a living artist, held by Jeff Koons’ Hanging Heart (2006), and cemented Freud’s position at the apex of the art market.
Tilley was not present at the auction. She has never received a share of the proceeds. Her compensation for the months of sittings – roughly £33 per day – amounted to a few thousand pounds. She resists a narrative of victimhood. “The press tried to make out that I was a poor simple girl from the Jobcentre plucked from obscurity,” she told ArtDependence, “but this was far from the truth.” She had been a fixture of London’s club scene since the early 1980s, knew Bowery and Boy George intimately, and had a vivid, independent life well before Freud entered it.
What the auction revealed was the extent to which the contemporary art market operates according to its own moral economy – one in which the model’s labour is absorbed into the value of the work without any mechanism for redistribution. The art critic Jonathan Jones, writing in The Guardian, called the sale “a grotesque spectacle of money laundering dressed up as connoisseurship.” The philosopher Julian Stallabrass, in Art and Finance (2020), argued that the astronomical prices fetched by Freud’s paintings reflect not aesthetic judgement per se but “the conversion of cultural capital into financial assets by the ultra-wealthy.”
The Body as Battleground
Freud’s paintings of Tilley have been interpreted through multiple critical lenses. The feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey argued that the female body in Western art has traditionally functioned as “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Some critics have applied this framework to Freud, reading his monumental nudes as exercises in the male gaze.
Others have pushed back. Marc Barham, writing in Counter Arts in 2025, described Benefits Supervisor Sleeping as “one of the greatest cultural and visual responses to the dominance of the gaze of the male,” arguing that Tilley’s body in the painting is not objectified but rather “overcomes the constrictions and restrictions of the male eye” through its sheer, undeniable presence. The painting, in this reading, is not a fantasy of dominance but an encounter with a body that refuses to conform to idealised norms.
Tilley herself has a characteristically pragmatic take on the question. “I feel like I’m an example for big women to show themselves off,” she told BBC Radio 4. “It’s good that it’s different. If everyone looked the same, it’d be boring, wouldn’t it? That’s what I’m like, and that’s what you have to accept, that all humans are different. Everyone’s got different things about them and they should be championed rather than brushed under the carpet.” She has also noted, with dry amusement, that people rarely recognise her even when standing in front of the paintings: “I recently went to see Freud’s paintings of me at the National Portrait Gallery, but I believe people at the venue failed to spot me because my hair is now grey.”
The Lion Carpet and the Living Legacy
The Sotheby’s sale of Sleeping by the Lion Carpet on 24 June offers a fresh chapter. The painting, completed in 1996, depicts Tilley slouching on a leather sofa, nude, with the lion-patterned carpet visible in the background. Art historian Martin Gayford, who sat for Freud and wrote the biography Man with a Blue Scarf (2010), has called it “the most important [work] that Freud has ever painted” – a superlative that, if borne out by the auction result, would place it among the most valuable paintings ever sold at a British auction house.
Tilley, now sixty-nine and living in Hastings, has reinvented herself. She published a biography of Leigh Bowery, Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon (1997), recently republished. She has exhibited her own paintings, collaborated with Fendi on luxury goods decorated with her illustrations, and become a familiar figure on the local arts scene. She is no longer merely the subject of someone else’s art – she is an artist in her own right, even if her name remains less familiar than the canvases that bear her image.
The enduring power of Freud’s paintings of Tilley lies not only in their technical virtuosity but in the questions they force us to confront. Who benefits when a body is transformed into a commodity? What obligations, if any, does the artist owe to the model after the paint has dried? And what does it mean that a woman who worked for decades helping unemployed people navigate the welfare system should herself become the most expensive body in the history of British art? As Tilley puts it, with the rich laugh that apparently delighted Freud during the sittings: “I’ve worked it out and I think I must be worth about £100m with the four paintings and all the etchings, and I think, ‘How can that be possible when I’ve never got any money myself?'”
The auction on 24 June will almost certainly provide one answer to that question. The rest belongs to the history of art – and to the unresolved argument between the value of a painting and the value of the life that made it possible.
