On the evening of 13 May 2008, in a crowded saleroom at Christie’s New York, Lucian Freud’s painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) sold for a record-breaking $33,641,000. At the time, this was the highest price ever paid for a painting by a living artist. The monumental masterpiece depicts an overweight female nude lying on a couch, sleeping. As the hammer came down on this artwork, its model was at work, worlds apart, in a job centre in London. How had this unlikely muse come into the life and art of Lucian Freud?
Freud was one of the greatest British painters of the twentieth century. Grandson of the famed psychologist Sigmund Freud, he is best known for raw and frankly painted portraits, including of nude figures, which he made from his London studio. The artist’s intention was always to capture the essence of the people he painted: ‘I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art.’
Throughout his career, Freud had many models; among his favourite was the flamboyantly dressed, colourful make-up-wearing performance artist, Leigh Bowery. Freud became fascinated by Bowery, after seeing him perform at the Anthony d’Offay gallery, and invited him to pose for several paintings over a period of four years. These pictures show Bowery in a series of contorted poses, wearing none of his characteristic costumes; instead he is completely exposed, with the focus on his bare folds of flesh.
Bowery loved to model for Freud, and decided to introduce the artist to one of his best friends, a job centre supervisor called Sue Tilley, as a potential next subject. Tilley remembers first encountering Freud on a night out, following which he invited her to meet him one on one: ‘He summoned me to a lunch at the River Café, a fancy restaurant in Hammersmith. I enjoyed myself – he was really trying to make a good impression on me, so he started telling filthy jokes… he was trying to make himself charming and funny.’
Freud was attempting to flatter Tilley, having already decided that he wanted to paint her. He didn’t ask his new muse directly, but after their lunch meeting had Bowery speak to Tilley, offering her the opportunity to model; she agreed. The pair of friends even had a practice run in Tilley’s flat, as she remembers: ‘Leigh made me strip off. I had to take my clothes off on my settee, so I could practise what it would be like for Lucian.’
Tilley also recalls her first impression of Freud’s studio, inside his large Victorian town house in Holland Park. She felt like she had stepped into one of the artist’s paintings: ‘There was a Rodin statue propped against the door, which he used as a doorstop. Then inside the studio there was paint all over the walls, because he used the walls to clean his brushes on, so they were just covered in a coat of oil paint in the colours he painted in.’
Freud’s studio became the backdrop for all four paintings of Tilley: Evening in the Studio (1993), Benefits Supervisor Resting (1994), Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) and Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1996). Tilley spent a huge amount of time there, posing for Freud three times per week; for the first painting she modelled at night, from 7.00 in the evening until 1.00 in the morning, and then for later works she posed during the day. Sticking to this strict schedule, each painting took nine months for Freud to complete.
Freud asked Tilley to lie down for each of the pictures: as she came to the studio either before or after work as a job centre supervisor, Tilley remembers that she quite naturally closed her eyes and really did, at times, fall asleep. For the first picture she reclined on the floorboards, which she says was ‘agony’; but by the next Freud had bought her a second-hand sofa so that she could make herself comfortable for paintings such as Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995).
Tilley’s pose – that of a reclining female nude – is one that appears repeatedly throughout art history. During the Renaissance it was popularised by Giorgione (1477–1510) with his painting Sleeping Venus (1508–10); the young woman’s soft, sensual curves mirror those of the undulating hills in the background. Other painters, including Titian, followed suit. These artists used the image of a nude Goddess of Love to represent idealised female beauty and femininity which, in fifteenth-century Europe, was a slim, white, smooth-skinned woman.
With his paintings of Tilley, Freud took on this trope of the flawless, naked deity. The title is an immediate play on the tradition: Venus has been replaced by Supervisor. Here we are presented with a real, ordinary woman who is reclining horizontally, but in a rather more unflattering pose than the one seen in Renaissance paintings; Tilley’s face is scrunched into the arm of the sofa and her left foot is tucked into its soft back. Most obviously, Freud has also inserted a voluptuous body into clichéd compositions of the slim female figure. He captured her curves on curves, stretching stereotypical views of femininity. It’s important to note that Freud painted this portrait during the 1990s, when Western society was holding up thinness as an unrealistic ideal for most women and critiquing the overweight as lazy and unhealthy.
Freud’s collaboration with Tilley called into question the narrow definitions of beauty which had so far been framed within art history and the media. As Tilley has said, ‘I made him appreciate the fuller figure woman.’ Today, these paintings of Tilley are held up by many as a celebration of ‘real women’ and diversity of appearance in the face of the thin ideal, which still pervades social media.
But Freud’s primary focus, despite his fixation on Tilley’s naked body, was not on external appearance or expressions of beauty at all. He painted the exposed human figure, in compelling detail, as a means of exploring what makes us human. In his captivating portraits of Tilley, Freud captured every contour and blemish on her skin, in a search for her psychological make-up.
As Freud revealed, in relation to his sitters, ‘I’m trying to relay something of who they are as a physical and emotional presence. I want the paint to work as flesh does. If you don’t over-direct your models and you focus on their physical presence, interesting things often happen. You find that you capture something about them that neither of you knew.’
Under his unflinching gaze, Tilley developed a deep friendship with and closeness to Freud: ‘We chatted all the time, about everything under the sun. The news, gossip, scandal, his past, his hatred of his brother, what we’d done the night before, where we’d been and who we’d seen, his history. I liked it when he told me about the olden days.’
Freud took an interest in Tilley’s life, too, even asking to meet her parents in order to know her better; the artist was trying to epitomise the essence of his models. ‘He wasn’t just painting what he saw, he had to paint what you were. You know, he could do the floorboards or a bit of the sofa while you weren’t there but he never did because he felt that your aura affected everything else in the room.’
Freud also spoke about his drive to portray an individual’s impact on the space around them: ‘The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell… Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with the subject itself.’
Tilley recognises the ‘collaboration’ which took place between artist and muse. She has also pointed out that there was never any romantic attachment, on either side: ‘When people say muse I think of those poor women who hung around with the Pre-Raphaelites, all mad in love with them and laid around in pools of cold water. But luckily I was never in love with Lucian, as many models seem to be, so that was a relief. I think that’s why we got on because there wasn’t that sexual tension between us. It was amazing.’
Tilley was a considerable, critical presence in Freud’s painting career. It was his notorious portraits of the nude ‘Supervisor’ sleeping which catapulted him to international acclaim. As Tilley acknowledges, ‘I think me and Leigh changed everything.’ The paintings of her have been exhibited in museums and galleries, including Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery. They have also paved the way for feminist painters, including Jenny Saville who portrays the powerful force of fleshy female figures.
Just as Tilley transformed the trajectory of Freud’s career, so too did he alter her life for ever. Christie’s record-breaking auction in 2008 brought her to the world’s attention; the media wanted a piece of this million-dollar muse, as Tilley remembers: ‘I was at work at the job centre and I got a call: “The Evening Standard are here to see you.” So I went down. I thought it was about work. And they said, “Did you know your picture’s about to be sold for millions, for a world record?” Next day, my phone wouldn’t stop ringing from papers, it was so peculiar. People were clutching the Metro and I was on the cover. From that day my life changed.’
Since then, Tilley has modelled for six artists, including fashion-designer-turned-sculptor Nicole Farhi. Today, she models for Portuguese artist Rui Miguel Leitão Ferreira, whose recent series of self-portraits ‘Posing for Sue’ explores the connection between artist and muse. In these paintings, Ferreira intentionally positions himself as a naked figure, in front of his model to switch their roles. He wrote in a letter to Tilley, ‘I wanted to put you in the place of an artist and me in the role of adoring muse, venerating you, wanting to be adored and observing the experience’.
Ferreira’s paintings also point to the fact that Tilley herself is an artist and trained art teacher. Today, she calls herself ‘a jobbing artist’, taking opportunities that come her way. She has worked on commissions, including portraits of the late Leigh Bowery, and collaborations with the likes of fashion brand Fendi. She’s also exhibited her paintings, including self-portraits in which she has become her own muse. Sue Tilley has one of the most famous bodies in the world. She has been held up as an icon of body positivity and recognised as Freud’s most significant muse, immortalised in his psychologically charged paintings of her sleeping. Today these artworks hang in the homes of the super-rich, and Tilley’s been invited to see herself in situ by several collectors. The muse was particularly pleased to find that she was positioned opposite the TV, ‘lying around watching telly’, in one lavish living room.
While Tilley has not received a single penny from the sale of Freud’s paintings, the subsequent fame has presented her with a whole range of opportunities. Some she’s declined, refusing to pose naked for the Daily Mail shortly after the Christie’s sale; others she has seized, capitalising on her status with integrity to enter into meaningful and creative collaborations in which she is at times muse, and others artist, but always on her terms.