{"id":139947,"date":"2025-09-13T01:51:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T01:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/139947\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T01:51:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T01:51:11","slug":"francis-bacons-favourite-painting-goes-on-sale-after-40-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/139947\/","title":{"rendered":"Francis Bacon\u2019s favourite painting goes on sale after 40 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

The portrait of a dwarf that Francis Bacon cherished perhaps more than any other has finally appeared for public sale 50 years after the artist first created the \u201cvoyeuristic\u201d figure and then separated it from the lovers in the rest of the composition. <\/p>\n

Bacon\u2019s 1975 painting of the seated dwarf is thought to be the sole work the artist kept for his own collection with agreement for a private sale only made years after its creation.<\/p>\n

The canvas has become one of the most discussed in the artist\u2019s catalogue, and the central figure hints at the influence on Bacon of Diego Vel\u00e1zquez, who frequently depicted court dwarfs.<\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/p>\n

Francis Bacon, Portrait of a Dwarf<\/p>\n

It is also notable in the surviving Bacon canon<\/a> for having originally been part of a larger canvas the artist is reported to have shown to the art historian Michael Peppiatt in the 1970s depicting two entwined figures \u2014 the artist and his late lover, George Dyer \u2014 being watched by a \u201cdwarf-like voyeur\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, Bacon later divided the canvas into two separate paintings: Two Figures, depicting the two caged lovers, and the slightly smaller Portrait of a Dwarf, which measures 159cm by 58cm.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Gauguin, Van Gogh and the secret of a truly revealing portrait<\/a><\/p>\n

Two Figures was sold by Peppiatt for \u00a35.5 million in 2016.<\/p>\n

Sotheby\u2019s, which is selling the signed Portrait of a Dwarf in London in its October Frieze week sale with an estimate of \u00a39 million, said Bacon had \u201cuniquely retained\u201d this work as his own. It said his subsequent display of it at exhibitions as \u201chis own property\u201d was a \u201crare exception and testament to the painting\u2019s personal significance for him\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Francis<\/p>\n

Bacon in his studio in London in 1974, a year before the painting was made<\/p>\n

MICHAEL HOLTZ\/ALAMY<\/p>\n

Alex Branczik, Sotheby\u2019s European chairman of modern and contemporary art, said he thought Bacon had been intending to destroy the half of the canvas with the two figures and wanted to \u201cpreserve the section with the dwarf seated because he felt it was the tour de force of the painting\u201d.<\/p>\n

Branczik said: \u201cHe was very attached to it; he exhibited it. The format is unique at this point in his career and the figure trapped within the confines of the narrow frame is part of what gives it its intensity.<\/p>\n

\u201cBacon was pretty brutal with his own oeuvre and destroyed many of his paintings but he felt the quality of the dwarf in this composition was so great that he wanted to preserve it.\u201d<\/p>\n

How much does a Francis Bacon painting cost?<\/p>\n

It is being sold by the family who purchased it 40 years ago along with Bacon\u2019s Study for Self-Portrait, 1980, which has been given a \u00a36 million estimate, and two of their Auguste Rodin bronzes.<\/p>\n

The most expensive Bacon painting sold publicly remains the \u00a389 million paid for Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969, in 2013. Another of his large-format works, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981, was sold for nearly \u00a370 million in 2020.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Are London\u2019s grand auction houses in trouble?<\/a><\/p>\n

Branczik said Bacon, who died in 1992 aged 82, remained \u201cone of the most popular and sought-after artists of the 20th century\u201d, adding that unlike with prolific peers such as Picasso, there were not that many artworks around.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis oeuvre is small for a major artist of his standing. Unlike many artists where you will find works on paper, studies or smaller paintings, everything Bacon released from his studio was a fully worked, fully conceived painting. He destroyed everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Branczik said the central dwarf figure showed Bacon\u2019s \u201cprofound connection with Vel\u00e1zquez\u201d, to whom he also paid homage in his series of studies of the 17th-century Spanish artist\u2019s Portrait of Innocent X.<\/p>\n

He said Bacon had also been influenced by a sculpture of Seneb, chief of the dwarfs in Ancient Egypt, which he had seen while in Cairo in the early 1950s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The portrait of a dwarf that Francis Bacon cherished perhaps more than any other has finally appeared for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-139947","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}