The Triple Portrait of Lucian Freud That Set Francis Bacon's Auction Record

Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), was bought by the casino billionaire Elaine Wynn for $142.4m at Christie's in New York on November 12, 2013, making it the then most expensive work of art sold at auction.

The three individual panels had been traded separately in the past. They were reunited at a triptych for the Francis Bacon touring retrospective that opened at the Yale Center for British Art in 1999.

Lucian Freud first met Francis Bacon in 1945, at the suggestion of fellow artist Graham Sutherland. Bacon and Freud, who was younger, immediately became firm friends as well as drinking and gambling companions, sharing the same haunts in Soho, London. In the 1970s, their friendship became chillier and rivalry increased, although their mutual respect remained strong.

Bacon's first portrait of Freud took the younger artist by surprise in 1951. Freud assumed he would sit but instead arrived at Bacon's studio to be find a portrait completed from memory. Freud created his first portrait of Bacon a year later, based on two or three months of intense, face-to-face sittings.

Bacon went on to create Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) using John Deakin's photographs of Freud taken during a specially commissioned photo-shoot.

The blobs of paint found on the triptych have been interpreted as a possible, grudging nod to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, which Bacon had first experienced at MoMA in 1968 on his first visit to the US for a solo show at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery. However, Bacon claimed to be unimpressed with the Abstract Expressionist, telling a friend, "dribbling of paint all over the canvas just looked like old lace".

In September 2025, Elaine Wynn's estate announced that she had donated the triptych to LACMA, a postumous gift from its former trustee and co-chair.

The sale beat Bacon's previous auction record by $56.12m, a 65% rise. The previous record was set by Triptych (1976), which sold for $86.28m at Sotheby's on May 14, 2008. The work had been traded once in the past.

A Brief History of Francis Bacon at Auction