Francis Bacon – Portrait of a Dwarf. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £13.1 MILLION
Portrait of a Dwarf by Francis Bacon is, at £6 million – £9 million, the most expensively estimated lot at Sotheby’s contemporary evening art sale in London on October 16. Executed in Paris in 1975 the painting stands alone in Bacon’s oeuvre. Four years after George Dyer’s tragic death on the eve of the artist’s Grand Palais retrospective in the same city, Bacon turned to Velazquez, his ‘God’, once again for inspiration. In the same way as his Popes had been presented on a dais or throne, here his subject is raised up to meet and confront the viewer directly. An amalgamation of Dyer’s hairline, Peter Beard’s face, Lucian Freud’s torso and Bacon’s own foreshortened legs, this figure melds some of his closest friends and greatest loves – yet still recalls Velazquez’s A Dwarf Sitting on the Floor
