Lucian Freud’s “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet,” one of the artist’s most imposing nude portraits of Sue Tilley, is heading to Sotheby’s London with a £25 million to £35 million estimate and the possibility of becoming a new benchmark for Freud at Sotheby’s when it is offered later this month.

The 1996 painting is scheduled for Sotheby’s Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection evening auction on June 24, a London sale built around works assembled by British businessman Joe Lewis. Sotheby’s has placed the broader collection in the region of £200 million, describing it as the most valuable single-owner collection ever offered at auction in Europe. The Freud canvas is among the most closely watched lots because of its scale, subject, provenance and place in the artist’s late body of work.

The auction house lists “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” with an estimate of £25 million to £35 million. In U.S. dollar terms, Associated Press coverage placed that range at about $33 million to $47 million. That estimate alone does not reach Freud’s overall auction record, but the work’s status as a major Tilley portrait has created the prospect that competitive bidding could push the result higher. Freud’s “Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau)” sold for $86 million in 2022, while “Benefits Supervisor Resting,” another portrait of Tilley, brought $56.2 million in 2015.

The current offering is significant because “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” belongs to the small group of large paintings that helped define Freud’s late-career reputation. Sotheby’s describes the work as a monumental portrait of Tilley painted in the mid-1990s, with the figure set against the visual density of a lion-patterned carpet. The auction house has emphasized its physicality, scale and painterly construction, presenting it as a major statement in Freud’s long engagement with flesh, space and portraiture.

Tilley, who worked in a London unemployment office, met Freud through Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery. She became one of the painter’s best-known sitters, appearing in several works that entered the canon of late 20th-century British painting. The titles attached to those works, including “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” and “Benefits Supervisor Resting,” reflected her day job and helped make her image unusually recognizable in the international art market.

The story behind the portrait has also become part of the painting’s market identity. Tilley has said that Freud’s portraits changed her life, even though she did not share in the later auction gains attached to the works. Her association with Freud links the painting not only to the artist’s studio practice but also to a wider 1980s and 1990s London creative scene that included Bowery and the club culture around him.

For U.S. collectors and market watchers, the sale is relevant well beyond London. Freud’s top auction prices have been set in sales that drew global bidding, and major evening auctions in London, New York and Hong Kong increasingly compete for the same pool of ultra-high-net-worth buyers. Sotheby’s, headquartered in New York with major international salerooms, is using the Lewis Collection to anchor a summer sequence of high-value figurative art that may indicate how much demand remains for blue-chip modern works after a more cautious period in parts of the art market.

The Lewis Collection sale also gives Sotheby’s a chance to test the appeal of a single-owner narrative. Such sales can generate momentum because works are framed not only as individual lots but as parts of a collector’s long-term vision. Sotheby’s promotional material highlights Lewis’s affinity for School of London painters, including Francis Bacon and Freud, and for artists who treated the human figure with intensity and psychological charge.

The auction house is presenting the collection in a public exhibition at its New Bond Street galleries from June 10 through June 23. That viewing window gives collectors, advisers and the general public access to the Freud painting before the June 24 evening auction. The sale is followed by a Modern Day Auction including works from the Lewis Collection on June 25.

“Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” is listed as lot 9 in the June 24 sale. Other highlights in the Sotheby’s materials include works by Edgar Degas, Gustav Klimt, Francis Bacon, René Magritte, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann and Chaïm Soutine. Sotheby’s has characterized the offering as a concentration of modern figurative painting, a category that continues to command premium pricing when a work is rare, well-provenanced and widely recognized.

Freud, who died in 2011 at age 88, built his reputation through portraits of friends, lovers, family members, fellow artists and himself. His nude paintings are often described as unsparing because they reject idealization, using thick paint and close observation to render skin, weight and posture. That frankness has been central to both the critical debates around his work and the market appetite for his largest portraits.

The potential record framing around the Sotheby’s lot should be read carefully. A presale estimate is not a guarantee, and auction records depend on buyer competition, guarantees, fees and the particular benchmark being measured. The painting is positioned to challenge Sotheby’s own Freud marks and to rank among the artist’s most valuable works if bidding is strong. Whether it can approach the artist’s broader auction record will depend on the depth of demand in the room, on the phones and online when bidding opens.

The timing also matters. The auction follows renewed attention to high-end art-market strategy, including the willingness of sellers and auction houses to bring major trophy works to market only when the presentation, estimate and buyer outreach appear favorable. A Freud of this scale offers a clear test: it is recognizable, museum-scale, tied to a famous sitter and backed by the story of a major private collection. Those qualities can help overcome a cautious environment, but they also raise expectations for a result that validates the estimate.

If “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” performs strongly, it would reinforce Freud’s standing as one of the most bankable British painters of the postwar era and give Sotheby’s a headline result in the London season. If bidding lands closer to the estimate’s lower end, the sale would still provide a useful read on how selective buyers have become at the top of the market. Either way, the portrait’s return to public view has already revived one of Freud’s defining subjects and placed Tilley, once again, at the center of a major auction story.