The subject of one of Lucian Freud’s “defining masterpieces” hopes the portrait will show people that “big girls can do well” as the painting goes up for auction and could fetch up to £35 million.
The painting, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, will go up for sale for the first time as part of The Lewis Collection from Sotheby’s in June.
The portrait, which was painted from 1995 to 1996, features Sue Tilley slouched on a leather couch fully naked and has been estimated to sell for between £25 to £35 million.
The painting took nearly nine months to complete with Tilley sitting for the late artist roughly three times a week when she was in her late 30s – an experience she described as being “very pleasurable” as it involved her sitting, eating and “being in the presence of the most important artist in the world”.
Speaking to the Press Association about the portrait, she said: “It shows all those skinny girls that big girls can do well as well. I feel like I’m an example for big women to show themselves off.
“It’s good that it’s different. If everyone looked the same, it’d be boring, wouldn’t it?”
Tilley hopes audiences will see the portrait and appreciate Freud as being a “marvellous painter” especially for the way he “observed humans as they are”.
She added: “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.
Speaking about Freud’s approach to art, she added: “He was just devoured by it and I think people make up stories about what he meant by his paintings, but all these paintings really are him testing himself.
“Sometimes the feet look really big, or the hand, because that’s perspective from your eyes, and he was testing himself all the time to make himself better and be able to do that better, and understand people.”
Tilley said he would not paint any of it without her there because her presence would make a difference on the space and the way the light reflected on different aspects of the room.
Freud painted four monumental canvases of Tilley between 1993 and 1996, with the auction house describing the final portrait as one of Freud’s “defining masterpieces” and the “final and most ambitious work” in the painter’s quartet of portraits of the former benefits supervisor.
It will be the first time the painting will appear at an auction after it was acquired directly from the artist at the time it was painted.
The last time a major painting from this series came to auction, it made history after his 1995 portrait, Benefits Supervisor Resting sold £35.9 million, breaking a record at the time – not only for Freud but for any living artist, according to the auction house.
Freud was introduced to Tilley via their friend the late Leigh Bowery, the performance artist and fashion designer who also featured in several of his early paintings from the 1990s.
The painting, which was unveiled on Friday, will be put on display from June 10 until June 23 as part of Sotheby’s The Lewis Collection exhibition which includes works by Klimt, Modigliani and Matisse.
Following the exhibition the pieces will go up for sale from June 24-25 with a combined estimated sale exceeding £150 million, making it the “most valuable collection ever offered in the UK”, according to Sotheby’s.
Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s Europe chairman, said: “If figuration is the beating heart of The Lewis Collection, then Freud is its lifeblood.
“Intimate and monumental in equal measure, drawing on the great traditions of the past but at the same time radically new and inventive, full of emotional and painterly complexity, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet is a masterpiece by any measure.
“It is, quite simply, one of the greatest portraits of the 20th century, if not in the entire history of Western art: ‘the Mona Lisa of the modern age’.”
