In this episode Ruth speaks to two individuals who reshaped the meaning of the word muse: Sue Tilley speaks about her experience as Lucian Freud’s model, and Morag Caister gives a personal insight into the gendered dynamics between artist and sitter with reference to her Sky Arts’ “Portrait Artist of the Year” competition-winning portrait of Lenny Henry, now in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection.

There have been calls by some critics and feminist art historians to cancel the word muse. But, can we instead successfully reclaim this term? What would this look like in practice? How should museums and galleries recognise the real-life individuals framed in their masterpieces through interpretation? In what ways should contemporary artists give credit to their muses? With increasing conversations about the abusive behaviour of great male artists, can we separate artist (and muse) from artwork?

Listen to the episode here:

Podcast Host: Ruth Millington

Ruth Millington is a Birmingham-based art consultant and curator with extensive experience of developing exhibitions, managing artists and their estates, advising on the acquisition and commissioning of artworks, and writing about culture.

She is the author of MUSE (Penguin, 2022) which uncovers the true stories of 30 muses, from Dora Maar and Elizabeth Siddal to George Dyer and Peter Schlesinger. Ruth’s first children’s book, This Book Will Make You An Artist (Nosy Crow, 2023), invites children to take creative inspiration from great artists of the past.

Ruth writes about the visual arts for publications including TIME, The Independent, The Telegraph, Dazed and Art UK. She has also been featured on TV and radio including Sky Arts, the BBC, C4, ITV and TRT World. Most recently, she presented a documentary on the radical history of collage art, ‘Painting with Scissors’ for BBC Radio 4.

Sue Tilley is an author, artist, presenter and artist’s model. She is famous for having sat for Lucian Freud over a period of nine months for four paintings and two etchings. She was also the muse and friend of the late fashion designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery and worked as the cashier for his notorious nightclub Taboo.

The National Portrait Gallery exhibition Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting runs from 12 February to 4 May 2026. Details are here.

To find out more about Lucian Freud’s portrait of Sue Tilley, Benefits Supervisor Resting (1994), visit the BBC Culture website, here.

Morag Caister is a British artist represented by London based gallery RHODES. Caister’s practice functions as a space in which less coherent aspects of the self can be met. By attending to what is unclear or contradictory within herself, the artist opens a broader consideration of what we are like as people.

Images discussed in this episode can be found below: