Francis Bacon’s famous 1975 work, Portrait of a Dwarf, goes under the hammer at Sotheby’s London next month (16 October) with an estimate of £9m.
The work was initially part of a bigger piece featuring two figures intertwined and fused together, representing Bacon and his lover George Dyer, who died by suicide in 1971. Bacon later decided to divide the canvas, giving the painting of the two caged lovers to the art historian Michael Peppiatt.
This work, known as Two Figures, was sold at Christie’s London in February 2016 for £5.5m (with fees); the work had an estimate of £5m to £7m. Referring to Peppiatt, the catalogue entry says that the painting was “acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1975.”
Peppiatt, who wrote a biography of Bacon in 2015, wrote in the accompanying catalogue essay: “I’d had a marvellous head of the writer Michel Leiris which Francis took back to work on—it’s now in the Centre Pompidou—and to replace it I was offered this huge canvas with two figures and a dwarf onlooker which I was very pleased with.
“Then Francis came round to my little flat one evening for drinks and he took that back too. He felt there was too strong a narrative element in it, and he decided the best way to remove that was simply to cut the image into two self-sufficient, beautifully painted halves. I was very proud to be entrusted with the Two Figures section because it records such an intense, intimate moment in his life so memorably.”
A Sotheby’s statement says that Bacon retained Portrait of a Dwarf as his own and took the extraordinary step of exhibiting it as “property of the artist” in a series of exhibitions, notably in a renowned show at the Galerie Claude Bernard gallery in Paris in 1977.
Portrait of a Dwarf calls to mind Bacon’s “profound connection” with Velázquez, as seen in his Pope series, says Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s European chairman of modern and contemporary art, in a statement. Velázquez depicted court dwarfs—people of short stature who were owned and traded across royal courts to provide service or entertainment—such as Sebastián de Morra, a jester at the court of Philip IV of Spain. The Spanish painter’s portrait of Morra, made around 1644, is housed at the Prado in Madrid.
The Bacon painting comes from a private collector who purchased it 40 years ago, according to The Times. The same collection has also consigned Bacon’s Study for Self-Portrait (1980; estimate £6m) to the October Frieze week sale, along with two bronze pieces by Auguste Rodin (Jean de Fiennes, vêtu, Grand Modèle and Pierre de Wiessant, vêtu, Grand Modèle, conceived 1885-86, cast 1984; estimate £600,000-£900,000 each).
