LONDON.- Sotheby’s unveiled one of the defining masterpieces of Lucian Freud’s career: Sleeping by the Lion Carpet — the final and most ambitious work in the artist’s celebrated quartet of monumental portraits of “benefits supervisor” Sue Tilley.

Vast in scale, virtuoso in their technique and radical in their approach, the four monumental canvases Freud painted of Sue Tilley are widely regarded not only as the artist’s greatest body of work, but also among the most important, most radical and most powerful paintings of the human figure in the entire history of art. Of those four works, executed between 1993 and 1996, this painting in particular stands out — described by leading art critic and historian Martin Gayford as “the most important [work] that Freud has ever painted.”

Though widely celebrated and exhibited in every major museum survey of the artist’s work, this painting — bought as it was directly from Freud’s gallerist and champion Bill Acquavella — has never before appeared on the open market. Having resided in the celebrated Lewis collection since 1996, it will now come to auction at Sotheby’s London in June with an estimate of £25–35 million ($33–45 million). The last time a major painting from this series came to auction, it made history. In 2015, Benefits Supervisor Resting (1995) sold for $56.2m (£35.9m), then a record, not only for Freud, but also for any living artist.

Lucian Freud, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, 1995–96. Estimate: £25–35 million

A radically modern and inventive artist, Freud was also deeply fascinated — and influenced — by the great artistic achievements of the past. So strong was his interest in the works of his forebears — Titian, Rubens, Velázquez and Manet among them — he was even granted his own personal set of keys to London’s National Gallery: a rare privilege that enabled him to spend long evenings, after the crowds had departed, studying the many great masterpieces on the gallery’s walls.

That influence is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his lifelong engagement with the subject of the nude which, alongside the self-portrait, is the defining leitmotif of Freud’s career.

In Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, Freud’s long nights at the National Gallery are evident. The flash of blue in the carpet above Sue Tilley’s head, for instance, is reminiscent of the vivid blue that lights up the background of Titian’s paintings. Its inclusion here was likely both a deliberate reference, and an artistic device which Freud knew, from the outset, would be transformative.

Knowing he needed a shock of blue to “lift” the painting, Freud went in search of the perfect prop. He found what he needed in the form of a “Lion Carpet” on the Westway on Portobello Road. As he handed £20 to the stall owner, however, he noticed in the corner of his eye two or three bystanders readying themselves to mug him. “Old instincts picked up from his Paddington days kicked in. In a flash, he said, he whipped his belt off and wrapped it round his fist as a knuckleduster. The chancers backed off.”
— William Feaver

Freud’s street-savviness was to the painting’s enormous advantage. Back in the studio, he waited until everything else was done before adding the startling blue sky of the carpet. “The more brown and grey-brown and pinky-brown and browny-pink it got the more I thought, ‘God, when the carpet comes up, all these things will start singing…’”

Titian’s Venetian blue, though, is not the only reference to the past to be found in this painting. Freud also absorbed the voluptuous beauty of Rubens’ nudes, and the idealised forms of other canonical nudes, from Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus to Manet’s Olympia. But here he takes all of that and does with it something radically different and entirely of his own making:

“Freud looks at Sue Tilley with something like astonishment — stripping away centuries of idealisation to rediscover the human form in all its raw immediacy. In so doing, he positions Sleeping by the Lion Carpet among the great nudes of art history — not by refining or perfecting the body, but by allowing it to exist in all its extraordinary reality. In the words of art historian Bruce Bernard, this may even be the painting that ‘put the final stop to the classical tradition.’”
Tom Eddison — How Lucian Freud Turned Flesh Into Architecture

Just as this painting represents a major turning point in the tradition of Western painting, so too — like his canonical predecessors — Freud has proved equally influential to a new generation of artists, from Marlene Dumas to Jenny Saville.

Freud and Sue Tilley

The subject of the painting, Sue Tilley, a local government benefits supervisor from London, is perhaps one of the artist’s most colourful sitters.

Freud was introduced to Tilley by his friend Leigh Bowery, the performance artist and fashion designer who also features in several paintings of the early 1990s. While she worked at the local job centre during the day, Tilley also worked nights on the till at Bowery’s famous nightclub Taboo.

“Leigh liked to sort people’s lives out,” Tilley recalls. “He didn’t like me working in the job centre and thought it would be nice for me to do something different. He knew he had to put the idea into Lucian’s head so he’d think it was his own idea. I was invited to lunch where I had to be inspected. Leigh told me what to wear and I completely ignored him as usual! So we had lunch at the River Cafe. It was very nice. Then the next thing I knew I was off being painted. Leigh came round to my house the day before to make me practise taking my clothes off.”

The encounter between Freud and Tilley was transformative. As critic Martin Gayford says, “The use of first Leigh Bowery and then Sue… precipitated the most exciting development in Freud’s painting in the ’90s: a stunning increase in the sense of sculptural mass. This was apparent in several of the Leigh Bowery paintings... But Sleeping by the Lion Carpet outdoes [those] in sheer plasticity, as — to my mind — it outdoes Courbet’s Bathers and similar performances from the past in sheer monumentality of physical presence.”

The sittings with Tilley were, as was often the case for Freud’s sitters, long and intense. Sometimes, over the course of the nine months it took Freud to paint this work, Tilley would ask whether she might take a break — whether, for instance, Freud might be able to paint the floorboards or other parts of the background without her there. But Freud insisted she be present at all times. “I just can’t do it when you’re not here,” he told her, “I need your aura, your presence affects everything, the colour of your skin affects the floorboards — it’s all connected.”

And so Tilley remained — often for long hours at a time — in the studio, and often, as here, falling asleep while Freud painted. When she was awake, they would chat, in the course of which Freud professed a keen interest in meeting Tilley’s parents. They were duly invited to visit him in his studio, where Freud and Tilley’s father immediately bonded over their shared love of sport, and where Freud served tea in paint splattered enamel cups — stirring in the milk with the end of his paintbrush.

Between 1993 and 1996, Freud painted four monumental canvases of Tilley. In this, the final and most ambitious of the works, Tilley sits, slumped and asleep, in a leather armchair. Her ample body fills the chair, just as it almost fills the eight-foot canvas. With her arm resting on the chair and her head leaning heavily on her hand, she sleeps, allowing Freud to examine her human form with almost forensic scrutiny, rendering every curve, fold, and contour of her flesh with utmost focus.

He uses a full spectrum of colours — from the purple of her heels to red of her belly, and from the rose of her tanned shoulders to the pale, translucent cream of her breasts — all rendered with a virtuoso mix of flecks, scumbling and broad brushstrokes that together create an endlessly varied surface where colour and texture combine to extraordinary effect.

In all of this, Tilley is at once monumental and — in the oblivion of sleep — vulnerable. For Freud, it seems, she is also regal: in the carpet depicted above her, a lioness stands guard over a sleeping lion; just as, while painting, Freud keeps watch over Tilley, whose power, even at rest, is unmistakable.

The Lewis Collection and Freud

The Lewises have long been among Freud’s greatest and most dedicated champions, recognising in his work, perhaps, the people of their home city — seen without sentimentality and with extraordinary humanity. Their tenacity in pursuit of the greatest Freuds has, since the early days, been remarkable. As William Feaver recounts:

“Another day, Ed King noticed a man obstructing the view of Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, while talking noisily into his mobile phone. He asked him to please refrain, only to be told by the man that he was in fact buying the picture; Joe Lewis was the name and he’d been speaking to Bill Acquavella who, before long, decided that the man’s appetite for Freuds had become such that he refused to let him have any more.”

But Joe quickly found ways to circumnavigate Acquavella, negotiating directly with Freud, “flaunting inducements, even suggesting that Lucian might care to buy into a horse he owned…”. Lucian, for his part, “rather admired Lewis’s persistence.”

The Lewis Collection: Exhibition and sale

Sleeping by the Lion Carpet will be on view to the public — in a specially designed exhibition — in Sotheby’s New Bond Street Galleries from 10–23 June. It will be shown alongside some 50 further masterpieces from the Lewis Collection, one of the greatest collections of modern figurative painting ever assembled. The works will be offered for sale on June 23 and 25, carrying a combined estimate in excess of £150m, making this the most valuable collection ever offered in the U.K.

Born and raised in London’s East End, Joe Lewis felt a natural affinity as a collector with the School of London painters, such as Bacon and Freud, whose work confronts the human condition with an uncompromising intensity. That early passion became the foundation for what is today one of the world’s most important private collections of modern art, shaped by a fascination with the human figure in all its forms. From Klimt, Schiele and Picasso to Caillebotte, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bacon and Freud, the Lewis Collection captures the radical inventiveness of the leading artists of the 20th century, and includes some of the greatest works of modern figurative painting to remain in private hands.