A $42 million portrait of Lucian Freud by his frenemy Francis Bacon, unseen for nearly 60 years, could set a new auction record:
was painted while the two were almost inseparable, spending hours in each other’s studios. When they weren’t painting, they were usually dining and drinking together.was originally the centerpiece of a large-scale triptych, in which each panel was based on a series of black and white photographs of Freud taken in Bacon’s South Kensington studio by their close friend John Deakin, whose portrait Freud was painting at the time.
By 1965, when this work was last exhibited in Dublin, the triptych had been split up and the central panel was sold to Colin Tennant, a British aristocrat. This often happens when there is a buyer for one section of a triptych only, and artists don’t always agree to it, although in this case Sotheby’s says Bacon did.
One of the side panels from this same Bacon triptych sold at auction in New York in 1993 for $1.7 million, double its estimate, to a private collector. The other now hangs in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The central panel, which has now re-emerged, has never come to auction before. It passed from Tennant to the Gallery Galatea in Turin, which sold works by Bacon to Gianni Agnelli, the head of Italian carmaker Fiat. Whether Agnelli, who died in 2003, bought this work is not recorded, but the present owner, whose identity has been concealed, is an intensely private European who bought the painting in the early 1980s but never exhibited it, Sotheby’s says.
Now, the auction house adds, “with all the attention around Bacon globally following the Royal Academy exhibition ‘Man and Beast’ and, of course, our activities for the Jubilee, the seller felt that our British art auction was the right platform and timeAnother triptych portrait of Freud by Bacon was made in 1969 at the Royal College of Art, after Bacon’s studio had been damaged by fire. It too was based on Deakin’s photographs and had been split into three.