Bacon's addict painting sets £7.9m record

A shocking Francis Bacon painting has sold for £7.9million, an auction world record for a work by the British artist.

Version No 2 of Lying Figure With Hypodermic Syringe, depicting a female nude apparently in a drugged stupor, was sold to a private buyer at Sotheby's in New York last night.

The auction set 15 records, among them one for a work by British sculptor Anish Kapoor. Bacon's 6ft-high painting easily topped its £6.3 million estimate and beat the previous £5.3million record for a Bacon, for Study For A Pope I (1961).

It depicts Henrietta Moraes, one of an inner circle of friends and lovers painted by Bacon, with a syringe in her arm. Bacon, who died in 1992, claimed the syringe served a purely visual purpose and had no sinister connotations. The artist met Mrs Moraes, former wife of Indian poet Dom Moraes, in Soho in the Sixties and painted her more than a dozen times.

Version No 2 was one of 90 paintings and sculptures sold from the collection of Belgian furniture manufacturer Roger Vanthournout, who died last year, and his wife Josette. Another depiction of Mrs Moraes was auctioned for £3.55 million in 2002, a world record for Bacon at the time.

Turner Prize- winning Kapoor proved the sensation of the evening when his untitled carved alabaster sculpture from 1999 went under the hammer for £1.2 million, far above the £236,000 estimate. The previous record for a work by Kapoor was £443,000.

Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art, said he was "thrilled" with the results of the sale, which made a total of £65.6million.