Benefits Supervisor Sleeping is a 1995 oil on canvas painting by Lucian Freud depicting an obese, naked woman lying on a couch. It is a portrait of Sue Tilley, then weighing about 127 kg, a Job Centre supervisor. Tilley is the author of a biography of the Australian performer Leigh Bowery titled “Leigh Bowery, The Life and Times of an Icon”. Tilley was introduced to Freud by Bowery, who was already modelling for him. Freud painted a number of large portraits of her around the period 1994-96, and came to call her "Big Sue". He said of her body "It's flesh without muscle and it has developed a different kind of texture through bearing such a weight-bearing thing"., The painting held the world record for the highest price paid for a painting by a living artist, of US$33.6 million (£17.2 million). It was sold at Christie's in New York in May 2008 to Roman Abramovich.
Famous quotes containing the words benefits, supervisor and/or sleeping:
“It is with benefits as with injuries in this respect, that we do not so much weigh the accidental good or evil they do us, as that which they were designed to do us.—That is, we consider no part of them so much as their intention.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“We work harder than ever, and I cannot see the advantages in cooperative living.”
—Lydia Arnold, U.S. commune supervisor (of the North American Phalanx, Red Bank, New Jersey, 1843- 1855)
“For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)