The painting 'Three Studies For a Portrait of Lucan Freud' sold for £23m.

The painting ‘Three Studies For a Portrait of Lucian Freud’ by Irish-born artist Francis Bacon was sold on Thursday night for £23m.

The painting was sold at auction at Sotheby’s in London for more than three times its pre-sale low estimate.

The unusual piece was painted by Mr Bacon in 1964 and shows a close friend, and fellow artist, with a variety of facial expressions.

It was estimated the painting, which was sold by a private collector, would sell for between £7m-£9m.

The painting was bought by an anonymous buyer in the packed saleroom after seven minutes of intense bidding by more than ten people, from four different continents.

Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 but grew up in Co Kildare. He left Ireland and spent most of his adult life in London. He died while  holidaying in Madrid, in 1992.

His studio was donated to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin where it was reassembled and is on permanent display to the public.

Bacon’s painting was one of 60 works in last night’s sale of a private collection of modern and contemporary art. Sotheby’s said all 60 works were sold raising a total of £93.5m.

The highest price ever paid for a painting by Francis Bacon was achieved in 2008 when Sotheby’s New York sold his Triptych, 1976for $86.3m to Russian billionaire and owner of Chelsea Football Club, Roman Abramovich.

Cheyenne Westphal, chairwoman of Contemporary Art Europe at Sotheby’s, said of Mr Bacon’s portrait piece: “This striking painting has everything a collector in the current market is looking for.

“It is an artwork that radiates ‘wall-power’ with its brilliant colour and dramatic brushstrokes.

“It narrates one of the most impressive artistic relationships of the 20th Century between two titans of British art and is desirably fresh to the market having remained in the same collection for almost half a century” she added.

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