Pound for pound Lucien Freuds ‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’ is over-abundantly yet gloriously fleshy, with paint gathered in great gobs and whirls, the finite details of his subject picked out in loving virtuosity. A mighty explosion of all things woman, in every possible sense.

Next month, the work, painted in 1995, and now on public view at Christie’s Auction House in London until April 15th, is predicted to become the most expensive painting by a living artist sold at auction, with an estimate of £12.7m-£17.7m. The current record for most expensive piece by a living artist to be sold at auction is held by Jeff Koons’ Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold), which made £11.3m in November 2007.

The portrait’s sitter, Sue Tilley - whom at the time of painting was indeed a benefits supervisor, though has since been promoted to manager of a Jobcentre Plus in central London - is delighted the attention the piece has attracted. “My life’s changed overnight,” she says. “I’m beside myself, but then lovely things are always happening to me. Still, I’m not surprised - in a way, I always thought this might happen. I love that painting.”

When asked by The Gaurdian in the UK: Is it not a little, well, exposing to have one’s magnificently generous breasts and lolling stomach revealed to the world? Tilley laughs: she was nervous, she says, about first stripping off, but quickly got used to it. Though, she adds: “I know it sounds weird, but even though there’d be no one else there I’d get dressed or put something round me just to go to the loo. I didn’t want to become a regular nudist.“

Tilley and Freud were introduced by a mutual friend - Leigh Bowery, one of Australia’s (and later the UK’s) most exuberant yet ingenious fashion designers / performing artists, whom Tilley had met in a nightclub in the early 1980s, and whose biography she wrote. Leigh Bowery was also a sitter for Freud. Bowery’s name for Tilley was Big Sue, and she was one of several sitters the performance artist recommended to the painter.

The first work had her posing, in great discomfort, with her backside on the cold studio floor - “and he made me look so horrible. I’m shaking now as I think of it.“

For Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, however, Freud bought the sofa for her to rest on. “It was lovely and comfy, and I just lay on it, really, for nine months.” she continues “Sometimes he’d take me out for lunch, which I liked, and we’d work again in the afternoon. It was quite exhausting, just lying there. I know it sounds silly, but it was.“

Frued’s Model Sitters

Freud has had the opportunity to immortalize a myriad of people, from all walks of life; including the Queen of England and Kate Moss, to name a few.

Harry Diamond Freud’s friend featured in Interior in Paddington (1951), part of the Festival of Britain. Though he complained about sitting, Freud painted Diamond several times.

Francis Bacon Bacon had painted a portrait of Freud in 1951, and in the following year Freud painted Bacon’s portrait in oils on a small copper plate.

His mother Freud painted his mother many times, and the day after her death he drew The Painter’s Mother Dead.

Leigh Bowery A transvestite performance artist, Bowery was an experienced model, and he sat frequently.

The Queen Freud’s portrait created controversy among the media and the public. Sittings happened at St James’s Palace in 2001 and 2002. Freud asked that the Queen wore the diamond crown seen on banknotes and stamps.

Kate Moss Moss is one of the few Freud models who have suggested themselves for the job, which she did in a magazine article. ..continued below

Lucien Freud - Girl with a white dog.

About Lucien Freud

Uncompromising, intense, even brutal - just some of the words used to describe the work of Lucian Freud

“The greatest living realist painter”

Whether painting the Queen in her finery or himself in the nude, Freud applies the same unwavering scrutiny to his subjects, and the stark results have brought him international renown. Still working as he approaches 80 and described by art critic Robert Hughes as “the greatest living realist painter”, Freud enthrals and disturbs in equal measure.

As the grandson of psycho-scion Sigmund Freud, any analysis of the artist’s inner turmoil must surely be old news. Nevertheless, the facts are that young Lucian was abruptly uprooted from his Berlin roots when his family fled Nazi Germany in 1933. Installed in England, he rejected education but developed an interest in art.

Bacon influence

Encouraged by his father, Lucian enjoyed a formal training at both the East Anglian School of Painting and the Central School of Art in London. His famous name gave him a golden ticket to the broadest echelons of London society, and his strong charisma didn’t hinder him. He was soon a leading light of the city’s bohemian art circle, where he encountered the already established Francis Bacon.

The pair formed a close, if competitive, friendship, and Bacon has been cited as the man who liberated Freud’s style. Impressed with the fluidity of the older man’s art, Freud dared to abandon his own meticulous technique. He also turned his full attention to the depiction of human life.

In a poignant postscript to this formative era, Freud’s portrait of Bacon was stolen over a decade ago from a German gallery. Freud designed a “wanted” poster for the painting and, until its recovery, will allow no reproduction of it to be made. ..continued below

Lucien Freud - Reflection (Self portrait)

Complicated private life

Freud has been as creative away from the easel, with the complicated private life of a true artist. His girlfriend Emily, more than 50 years his junior, is the subject of some of his recent work, but over the years, few of his extended family have escaped his professional gaze.

Instead of berating their often absent father, Freud’s children celebrate their time as his subjects. His daughter Bella describes the luxury of “hearing him talk, on almost any subject, and asking him questions”.

“A great searchlight of intelligence”

Members of the aristocracy are equally impressed. Of his sessions sitting for the artist, the Duke of Devonshire recalls “being in the presence of a great searchlight of intelligence”.

Never sentimental, his lifetime of work attests to his enduring interest in the human condition. His mother was the subject of a remarkable series of portraits, where his warmth for her pervaded the canvas. In one self-portrait, he is wearing just boots to protect himself from the paint.

The artist is notoriously private, insisting that all we need to know about him is in the art. Lucian Freud may be famously brutal with his brush, but his compassion and vulnerability are part of every stroke.