Francis Bacon
Self-Portrait, 1975 – copyright Sotheby’s
Led by a pair of re-discovered Francis Bacon self-portraits never seen in public before and each estimated at £10-15 million a private collection of rarely seen masterpieces comes up at Sotheby’s this summer. The collection of 21 works will be offered across a series of sales in London, New York and Paris between May and July. Assembled in the 1970s and 80s, the collection draws together terracotta heads from Nigeria and Ghana and works by the greats of 19th and 20th century art: Edgar Degas, Edouard Vuillard, Yves Tanguy, Henry Moore, Lynn Chadwick and R.B. Kitaj tracing the human form over 400 years.
The Bacon portraits come up at the Contemporary Art evening sale in London on July 1. More works will come up at the Impressionist and Modern evening sale on June 24. There will be African works in New York on May 15 and Paris on June 24.
