A painting by the grandson of famed psychologist Sigmund Freud, depicting a nude London clerk, sold for a staggering $39 million at auction on Wednesday, June 24, with the model expressing delight over the artwork’s success.
“Mona Lisa wasn’t alive when she became famous — but I am,” Sue Tilley, 69, told The Wall Street Journal after Lucian Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet sold at Sotheby’s in London.
Painted between 1995 and 1996, the portrait depicts Tilley, then 35, asleep in a chair without any clothing. It is one of four portraits the renowned British artist painted of her.
At the time, Tilley worked as a supervisor at an employment office while also working part-time at a London nightclub when Freud, then 70, invited her to sit for him alongside his circle of friends and muses.
Asked why she agreed to pose nude, Tilley told The Wall Street Journal: “He was funny and bought us nice food.”
