Seminal Lucian Freud Painting Comes to Auction for the First Time

Sotheby’s will auction 50 lots from billionaire Joe Lewis’s major figurative painting collection in London in June, with an additional 51st lot added: Lucian Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995–96). The collection includes works by Gustav Klimt, Amedeo Modigliani, Francis Bacon, and Leon Kossoff, offered across an evening sale on June 24 and a day sale on June 25. Sleeping by the Lion Carpet is the last of four Freud canvases of Sue Tilley from the mid-1990s, part of the Benefits Supervisor series. Tilley was introduced to Freud in 1990 through Leigh Bowery. The painting shows Tilley posed with vulnerability, with a lion-themed carpet behind her that adds surreal and vivid blue elements. Freud painted over nine months, building flesh folds slowly, while Tilley sometimes found the pace difficult.

"Sotheby's said that it would offer the most valuable collection of art ever to come to auction in the United Kingdom this coming June in London: 50 lots from the storied collection of the billionaire businessman Joe Lewis. Over the past four decades, Lewis assembled a collection of figurative painting that includes examples by Gustav Klimt, Amedeo Modigliani, Francis Bacon, and Leon Kossoff, which will all come to the block during an evening sale on June 24 and a day sale on June 25. Now a 51st lot will join them: Lucian Freud's Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995-96), which heads to auction for the first time with an estimate of £25 million to £35 million ($34 million to $47 million), pushing the collection's total estimate north of £150 million ($202 million)."

"The unflinching and imposing piece is the last of four canvases Freud painted in the mid-1990s of Sue Tilley, a London job center worker, that forms part of his "Benefits Supervisor" series. Freud was introduced to Tilley in 1990 through the legendary queer performance artist Leigh Bowery, and she became one of his most striking yet enigmatic sitters. In Lewis's picture, Freud captures Tilley simultaneously at ease and deeply vulnerable, posing and unguarded, exaggerated and human. Behind her, a carpet that the artist snapped up at a West London flea market depicts lions on the prowl, lending the work a surreal quality and a pop of vivid blue."

""Freud looks at Sue Tilley with something like astonishment, stripping away centuries of idealization to rediscover the human form in all its raw immediacy," Tom Eddison, head of contemporary art at Sotheby's, said in a statement. In typical Freud fashion, he painted Tilley at a snail's pace, building up folds of flesh with an almost sculptural intensity over the course of nine months. At times, the speed grated on Tilley. Could he not paint the floorboards or the savannah scene in her absence? Freud declined."

Read at Artnet News