Lucian Freud portrait headed to Sotheby’s with a $45 million estimate
A major Lucian Freud portrait that has never before been offered publicly is set to anchor Sotheby’s London sales in June, bringing one of the artist’s most closely watched late works back into view. Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995–96), a monumental portrait of Sue Tilley, carries an estimate of £25 million–£35 million, or $33 million–$45 million.
The eight-foot canvas is the last and most ambitious of four large portraits Freud made of Tilley, who worked in a London social welfare office when she became one of his best-known sitters. Introduced to Freud by performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery, Tilley sat for nine months as Freud painted her slumped in a leather armchair, asleep and unguarded. Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, Tom Eddison, described the work as having “sculptural intensity that is both unflinching and deeply humane.”
The painting has been in the collection of British financier Joe Lewis since 1996, when it was acquired directly from Freud’s gallerist Bill Acquavella. Its appearance at auction marks the first time the work has come to the open market. The last major work from the Sue Tilley series to appear at auction, Benefits Supervisor Resting (1995), sold for $56.2 million in 2015, then a record for any living artist.
Sotheby’s European chairman Oliver Barker called Sleeping by the Lion Carpet “the Mona Lisa of the modern age,” pointing to Freud’s long engagement with Old Masters including Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, and Diego Velázquez. He also called it “one of the greatest portraits of the 20th century, if not in the entire history of Western art.”
The painting will be on public view at Sotheby’s New Bond Street galleries from June 10–23, ahead of a broader sale of more than 50 works from the Lewis Collection. That group carries a combined estimate of more than £150 million, or $201.57 million, making it the most valuable collection ever offered in the U.K. The sale places Freud’s late portraiture at the center of a market moment that is as much about rarity as it is about scale.
