The work, Study For Portrait Of Lucian Freud, had not been seen in public for nearly 60 years and was owned by the same person – described by Sotheby’s as a “leading European collector” for four decades.
It was originally estimated to make £ 35 million before going under the hammer at the auction house,
The artwork was painted by Bacon in 1964 and is based on a photograph of his contemporary and great friend Freud, taken in the same year by their mutual friend John Deakin.
It was last exhibited in 1965 when it was seen as the central panel of a large-scale triptych as part of a traveling exhibition to Hamburg and Stockholm.
The piece was also shown on its own in Dublin in the same year.
Bacon separated the three individual works of the triptych shortly after it was created, with the left-hand panel in a private collection and the right-hand piece belonging to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Bacon and Freud were friends for 20 years before Bacon’s creation of Study For Portrait Of Lucian Freud and shared a friendship for more than 40 years, before relationships soured and the relationship ended in the mid-1980s.
Both artists painted each other on numerous occasions, with Freud often painting from real life and Bacon preferring to work from photographs.
In the case of Study For Portrait Of Lucian Freud, Bacon used an image of Freud sitting on a bed with his arms outstretched, fists clenched and white sleeves rolled up above his elbows.
The black and white photographs taken by photographer Deakin became Bacon’s primary source material when he obsessively painted Freud in the 1960s.
Bacon kept the photos with him for the rest of his life, and they were rediscovered, torn, crumpled and spray-painted in his studio after his death in 1992, Sotheby’s said.
Prior to the sale of the portrait, senior director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, Tom Eddison, described the work as “performed with picturesque bravo at the height of Bacon’s praise”.
He also said the painting “pulsates with an intensity, a tension that reflects the emotions that have bound these two sparring partners (Bacon and Freud) together for more than four decades”.