Francis Bacon's portrait of Lucian Freud, owned by Roald Dahl, for sale
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Version 0 of 1. A logjam of giant names in the arts comes together in one small canvas to be auctioned next month: Lucian Freud, painted by Francis Bacon, and owned by the late Roald Dahl. Dahl died in 1990, Bacon in 1992, and Freud in 2011. Although they later fell out, the young Bacon and Freud were close friends, who painted one another's portraits – and Dahl was a great admirer and friend of Bacon's. The renowned children's author bought this Study for Head of Lucian Freud in 1967, the year it was painted, for £2,850 with the proceeds from one of his most famous books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It will be sold next month at Christie's estimated at up to £12m. Bacon's only other painting of Freud was made in 1951. Freud's even tinier portrait of Bacon, also in 1951, is one of the 20th century's missing masterpieces. The disastrously pocket sized picture, painted in oils on a copper etching plate, was immediately bought by the Tate, but stolen from a touring British Council exhibition in Berlin in 1988. In 2001 Freud issued a personal appeal, on a poster he designed himself, for its return in time for a retrospective of his work, but it has never resurfaced. Dahl, whose work has at least as many dark shadows as Bacon's, said he found the artist emotionally exciting. "I can see no other valid way of assessing a painting's worth. No paintings stir and excite me quite as much as those of Francis Bacon. I know there are some people who are not moved by them at all, and to those unfortunates I would say 'jolly bad luck, I can't help you'." Francis Outred, Christie's expert, said he saw many similarities between the work of Bacon and Dahl. "Even though these two creative geniuses worked in different fields, they shared a keen sense of the macabre, which can be seen in both of their work: where Bacon used his rapid, impulsive brush marks to create an intimate and startlingly animated portrait, Dahl used his pen to create unforgettable stories that sear the imagination with provocative and affecting images." "Both were enigmatic outsiders who were hard to pin down and liked to work in small, claustrophobic spaces. Both also aroused controversy and fascination in their public and private lives." At one point Dahl owned five works by Bacon, but sold them all except the Freud, which has remained in the family collection until now. It is being sold to invest in the philanthropic work he began, including one for seriously ill children, and the Roald Dahl museum and story centre, which attracts 70,000 visitors a year to the Buckinghamshire museum of Great Missenden, near his home and famous writing hut in the last 36 years of his life, where Bacon was also a regular visitor. |