Rare Bacon painting goes for £23m

A rare Francis Bacon painting was sold at auction for £23 million – three times the pre-sale estimate.

The triptych, Three Studies For A Portrait Of Lucien Freud, shows Bacon’s friend and fellow artist with a variety of facial expressions.

Cheyenne Westphal, chairwoman of Contemporary Art Europe at Sotheby’s, said: “This striking painting has everything a collector in the current market is looking for.

“It is an artwork that radiates ‘wall-power’ with its brilliant colour and dramatic brushstrokes.

“It narrates one of the most impressive artistic relationships of the 20th century between two titans of British art and is desirably fresh to the market having remained in the same collection for almost half a century.”

It took seven minutes for the painting, originally valued at between £7 million and £9 million, to sell at the auction house’s London saleroom.

A Sotheby’s officials said more than 10 people, from four different continents, put in bids for the painting until it sold to an anonymous buyer in the room for £23,001,250.

The sale of European art, all part of a private collection, also saw a Salvador Dalì work reach £13,481,250 – a new record for any Surrealist work of art sold at auction.

The price for the painting, Portrait de Paul Eluard, triples the previous record for Dali of £4.1 million, which was only reached the previous da, also in London. The sale prices include buyer’s premium.