For hours on a London divan, Sue Tilley let her thoughts drift while Lucian Freud painted her sleep. The former job-centre worker, now retired, recalls the sessions with an amused detachment, still puzzled that her likeness would later sell for tens of millions of dollars. On Wednesday, Sotheby’s will auction Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, a canvas from the collection of businessman Joe Lewis, with an estimate of up to €40 million. “That I am worth millions seems very strange to me,” Tilley told Le Figaro, a model whose presence was prized by the late British master but who remains an accidental witness to the art market’s alchemy.

Half a world away, the question of what makes a painting valuable is being tested in a far less celebratory register. Australian artist Jane Allan won the A$20,000 Doyles Landscape Art Award last year for Seaside Explorers, a beach scene she said depicted herself and her brother as children. After the work was revealed to bear striking compositional and textural similarities to Nicholas Harding’s 2011 painting Two Estuary Figures, prize administrators called it “an imitation” and are now examining whether the money can be recovered. A second work, Weight of the Mind’s Periapt, which earned Allan the A$2,000 Art Handler’s award in the 2022 Darling Portrait Prize, has been identified by Australian National University art historian Sasha Grishin as “a dead ringer” for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 Untitled (Two Heads on Gold). Grishin described the practice as “plodding plagiarism,” while Brisbane art dealer Philip Bacon noted that the beach scene’s personal narrative “is not true.” The National Portrait Gallery acknowledged its handlers had observed Allan was “clearly influenced by Basquiat,” but maintained that entrants must declare their work original.

Viewed from Canada, the enduring demand for Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis offers a counterpoint. At a June auction by Miller & Miller, her cat-themed works sold for well over $40,000 each, sourced from families who bought them directly from Lewis in the 1950s and 1960s. Collector Alan Deacon, who first purchased a painting from Lewis in the late 1960s, attributes her lasting appeal to a style that is “not like any other artist in North America” — a self-taught vision of colourful rural scenes whose authenticity, he says, has taken decades to be fully recognised. The market, according to auction house CEO Ethan Miller, remains strong because “her pieces are timeless. Her story is timeless.”

In Sydney’s inner west, a different kind of value was erased with a coat of white paint. The mural We Run as One, commissioned by Inner West Council in 2023, depicted then-eight-year-old Arran Keith, who has cerebral palsy, completing a fun run surrounded by friends. After the tenant business that had sponsored the work went into liquidation, the building manager painted over the five-metre-wide image, leaving a blank wall. Arran, now 16, said he was “humbled” by the community’s outrage, while his mother recalled the crowd cheering him on as he finished last. The council acknowledged it had little power to intervene on private property, and a former tenant called the removal “an absolute shocker.”

From a London auction room to a freshly whitened wall in Rozelle, the episodes trace the fragile, contested ways art accrues meaning. Tilley’s form, rendered by Freud’s brush, is about to be converted into a sum that still baffles her. Lewis’s kittens, painted for passing tourists, now anchor a major exhibition in Yarmouth. Allan’s prize-winning canvases, stripped of their accompanying stories by expert eyes, face a reckoning over the line between influence and imitation. And on a busy intersection, a blank surface awaits either the slow creep of graffiti or a future image that might again hold a community’s memory.