Francis Bacon valuation
Screaming popes, triptychs, and a studio floor he refused to let anyone tidy.
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909, thrown out of the family home as a teenager, and worked as an interior decorator before painting seriously.
What a work by Francis Bacon is worth
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Bio
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909, thrown out of the family home as a teenager, and worked as an interior decorator before painting seriously. He had no formal training. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, shown in London in 1945, arrived as the war ended and made his name at once. What followed was fifty years of the same concerns: the human figure isolated in a glass cage or a bare room, the papal portraits after Velazquez, and the great triptychs, many of them addressed to George Dyer, who died in Paris in 1971 on the eve of Bacon's Grand Palais retrospective. He worked at Reece Mews in South Kensington in conditions of legendary disorder until 1992.
Bacon destroyed a great deal of his own work and disowned more, so what survives is finite and heavily documented. The catalogue raisonne published by the Estate in 2016 is the reference, and a work absent from it needs explaining. He insisted his paintings be glazed and framed to his specification, and original frames are part of the object rather than packaging. Prints, mostly lithographs and etchings after paintings, were editioned in his lifetime and are a separate and much larger market.
At a glance
- Born
- 28 October 1909, Dublin
- Died
- 28 April 1992, Madrid
- Movements
- Surrealism, Expressionism, Cubism
More on Wikipedia.
Drawings and posthumous prints
Bacon often said he did not draw, and works on paper are where most disputed attributions now sit. Several large groups of drawings and sketches have appeared since his death, some from people who knew him, and the estate's authentication committee, set up in 2006, has rejected many of them. A work on paper with a Bacon story attached needs the committee's view, or a place in the 2016 catalogue raisonné, before it can be sold as his.
The prints are more straightforward. He supervised his lifetime editions closely and signed them, and they are recorded. Three prints were issued after his death, approved by him but unsigned, and carry an estate stamp in place of a signature. Beyond those are the posters and reproductions made for exhibitions, which look similar on a wall and belong to a separate and much smaller market.
Berlin, Paris and the studio in Dublin
At seventeen Bacon spent two months in Berlin, where he saw Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, and then a year and a half in France; at Chantilly he saw Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents, which he referred to often. The screaming nurse from Potemkin and the plates of a secondhand book on diseases of the mouth, bought in Paris in 1935, stayed in his work for life. That winter Roland Penrose and Herbert Read visited his Chelsea studio and judged the paintings not surreal enough for the International Surrealist Exhibition.
Around 590 of his paintings survive. Erica Brausen represented him for twelve years from 1947 and gave him his first one-man show at the Hanover Gallery in 1949, where Head VI was his first surviving picture after Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X; he saw the original only once, late in life. In 1998 his heir, John Edwards, gave the contents of the Reece Mews studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, which surveyed them, moved them and rebuilt the studio there.
Best auction results
- Three Studies of Lucian Freud $142.4m
- Triptych, oil on canvas, 1969 · New York · 12 November 2013
- Publicly reported
- A record for any work of art at auction at the time.
- Triptych, 1976 $86.3m
- Triptych, 1976 · New York · May 2008
- Publicly reported
- Then a record for a post-war work at auction.
- Study for Portrait II £14.2m
- Oil on canvas, 1956 · London · February 2007
- Publicly reported
- Consigned by Sophia Loren from the collection of Carlo Ponti.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
