Francis Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer Crouching (1966) will be featured in Sotheby’s contemporary evening auction in New York this May, making its first appearance on the market since 1970, when it was acquired from Marlborough Gallery. The work is expected to fetch between $30 and $50 million. It is one of 10 monumental portraits Bacon painted of George Dyer, his lover and muse, between 1966 and 1968.
Portrait of George Dyer Crouching stands over six feet tall and is one of the few works in this series to remain in private hands. This work portrays a shirtless Dyer with a triplicated face that fuses with Bacon’s own, imbuing the painting with a sense of psychological interdependency that defined the pair’s tumultuous love affair. Their relationship, which began in 1963, was a major influence on Bacon’s later works, which often dealt with themes of human vulnerability.
“The first-ever monumental single portrait by Francis Bacon of his most famous subject, George Dyer, this painting is one of the artist’s most raw and intimate windows into their rollercoaster love affair,” said Grégoire Billault, Sotheby’s chairman for contemporary art. “At times passionate, intense, and sorrowful, their relationship inspired many of Bacon’s most revered works and continues to be a source of legend.”
Sotheby’s sale of Portrait of George Dyer Crouching will mark the first time a full-scale portrait of Dyer will be offered at auction since 2014, when Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966) sold for $70 million at Christie’s in London. Only 9 of the 10 Dyer portraits in this series survive, after a fire destroyed one in 1979.
