She Was Freud's Muse. Her Portrait Just Sold for $39M

The woman whose body helped rewrite the market for contemporary portraiture just watched one of those likenesses go for $39 million—not that she saw a cent of that. In the Wall Street Journal, Kelly Crow revisits the unlikely art-world journey of Sue Tilley, who was 35 and working part time as a cashier at a London club owned by a friend who'd herself posed for Lucian Freud; the friend thought Tilly would be good at it. Freud, then 70 in 1992, agreed. He paid her $35 to $50 a day to sit for him; each of the four portraits he ultimately made took about nine months. One of those works, the nearly 8-foot "Sleeping by the Lion Carpet" (1995-96), on Wednesday became the third-priciest Freud at auction.

Crow traces how Tilley went from feeling "grotesque" when she first saw herself on Freud's canvases ("critics hail[ed] her voluptuous, vulnerable body," writes Crow) to embracing her status as his defining muse; those four paintings have sold at auction for roughly $129 million in total. She recalls feeling utterly comfortable with Freud, in part because there was no sexual aspect to their relationship. "Sometimes I'd properly go to sleep and I'd feel a hand move my bosom back into place." It didn't bother her, Crow writes; "she felt like a work of art to him." Read the full story for more.