Bacon painting set to break sales record

Triptych 1974-77 by Francis Bacon

Triptych 1974-77 by Francis Bacon

A painting by Irish artist Francis Bacon is expected to set a new record when it goes under-the-hammer tonight.

Triptych 1974-77is being sold from a private collection and will appear at auction for the first time, at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London.

Dublin-born painter Bacon (1909-92) already holds the record for an auction sale of any Irish or British work with Study From Innocent X (1962), which sold for nearly €35 million last May.

Although the triptych is officially estimated at  €35 million, it is expected to smash the record.

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The painting is the last in the series that Bacon painted in response to the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971. The work shows sequential images of dark, ominous umbrellas and Bacon's lover struggling on a near-deserted beach.

It was painted before a major retrospective of Bacon's paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Dyer had committed suicide on the eve of the opening of Bacon's last retrospective before the New York show, in Paris, in the hotel room he shared with the artist.

Many of Bacon's works after this moment were preoccupied with Dyer and his tragic death.

Sotheby's is expecting its Bacon painting, Study Of A Nude With Figure In A Mirror, painted in 1969, to sell for more than €35 million on February 27th as it goes head-to-head with Christie's in the sales of contemporary art.