In Atlas Obscura’s Q&A series She Was There, we talk to female scholars who are writing long-forgotten women back into history. It was 1991 and Sue Tilley was heading to her second job. When she arrived at the unassuming, brown brick townhouse in London, she said hello to her employer and began to strip. For five years, Tilley posed for British painter Lucian Freud, who completed four canvases featuring her naked, curvy form. In recent years, those paintings have become some of Freud’s most expensive, garnering tens of millions of…
