Bacon's brooding Pope to smash auction records

The record for a Francis Bacon painting is expected to be smashed when one of his papal masterpieces goes under the hammer.

Christie's auction house is selling Study For Portrait II next month, when the work is expected to fetch at least £12 million.

Being sold by a private collector, and appearing in public for the first time, it is one of the most famous of the 50-plus papal portraits painted by Bacon, who was obsessed by Velazquez's 1650 Portrait Of Pope Innocent X.

Study For Portrait II is thought to be the second of two paintings of popes that Bacon painted in the autumn of 1956.

More sympathetic than some of his other depictions of the Pope, which appear to be screaming grotesquely, Study For Portrait II depicts him as a tragic hero overwhelmed by external forces. The sale will lead Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art sale at King Street, St James's, on 8 February.

The auction house expects the sale to shatter the record for a Bacon set in November when his 1968 painting Version No2 Of Lying Figure With Hypodermic Syringe sold for £7.8 million in New York.

Pilar Ordovas, head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie's, said: "Without doubt it is one of Francis Bacon's greatest Pope paintings and the most important work by him to come up at auction. Most of his masterpieces are in public galleries and museums. Very few of them are in private hands.

"We expect records to be broken. The market is incredibly strong and when something of this quality appears, anything is possible. The sky's the limit."

Like much of his 1950s work, Study For Portrait II suggests the influence of Bacon's long-time lover Peter Lacy. Dublin-born Bacon, who lived much of his life in Soho until his death in 1992, had just returned from visiting Lacy in Morocco when he painted the portrait. Ms Ordovas said: "Is the painting a representation of a Pope, inspired by Peter Lacy or is it a figure of his father? It's an incredibly powerful and striking image."