Bringing Home the Bacon

Over Labor Day, Christie's announced that a Francis Bacon painting owned by the Royal College of Art would headline its October sale of contemporary art in London. It turns out Sotheby's has a Bacon of its own:

The auction house will sell the artist's 1983 diptych portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne in London this fall. The painting, which carries an estimate of $4.06 million, is being sold by the family of Paul Brass, the doctor to whom Bacon gave the painting.

Sotheby's Oliver Barker told the Times Online that the Brass family is selling now because "they've seen what's happening in the Bacon market." Last November, the auction house sold Bacon's Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe for just over $15 million, an auction record for the artist that has repeatedly been broken over the course of less than a year. In February Study for Portrait II brought just shy of $27.6 million at Christie's in London. Then in May, Sotheby's got $52.68 million for Bacon's Study from Innocent X, a new record for Bacon at auction and, in fact, for any piece of contemporary art at auction until the Rockefeller Rothko brought more than $72 million not 10 lots later in the sale.