The Self-Portrait That Set Jenny Saville's Auction Record

Jenny Saville's Propped (1992) sold for $12.43m (GBP9.54m) at Sotheby's in London on October 5, 2018. The oil on canvas work had been traded twice before.

Jenny Saville (1970) first made her name in the early 1990s with her large-scale and expressive paintings of the human body, including her own.

Propped was first displayed at Saville’s degree show in Edinburgh in 1992, the year it was painted. In the show she hung her more than two-metre-tall canvas opposite a mirror placed at a distance equal to the height of her ambitious painting.

When it was featured on the front cover of Times Saturday Review that year, it caught the eye of the collector Charles Saatchi, who snapped it up.

In 1997, Propped was among the headline-grabbing works in "Sensation", a show of highlights from Saatchi's collection organized by London's Royal Academy of Arts. The controversial show helped propel the careers of several YBAs (Young British Artists). In 2004, it was acquired by the late collector David Teiger.

The bravura painting was most recently displayed in “NOW: Jenny Saville", the artist's major retrospective organized by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in 2018, shortly before its record-breaking sale.

The sale beat Saville's previous auction record by $3.37m, a 37% rise. Her previous record was set by Shift (1996), which sold for $9.05m at Sotheby's on June 28, 2016. The work had not been traded before.

A Brief History of Jenny Saville at Auction