Freud's portrait of Bacon only makes low estimate of £5.4m

THE last surviving portrait of Francis Bacon by his friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud has failed to reach its upper estimate at auction.

It sold to an unnamed private buyer for £5.4million, at the very conservative end of its £5-7million guide price.

It was the centrepiece of a sale of post-war and contemporary art at Christie's in St James's which also featured works by Andy Warhol, Peter Doig, Anish Kapoor, Bill Viola and Ron Arad.

The sale made £32million, less than predicted, with the highest-selling lot being Lucio Fontana's 1963 work Concetto Spaziale, La Fine di Dio (Spatial concept, The end of God), which went for £9million. Pilar Ordovas, head of post-war and contemporary art, Christie's London, said: "Although the sale results did not match our pre-sale expectations, it is important to note that this evening's auction realised the second highest total for an October auction of post-war and contemporary art at Christie's."

Two Freuds went under the hammer last night, neither of them achieving anything like the £17.2million achieved in May by his Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which was a record for the highest auction price paid for a work by a living artist. At the time the buyer was reported to be Roman Abramovich.

Last night the 1952 work Girl Reading made £2.2million. A spokesman for Christie's said the rarely seen oil of Bacon "offers a tangible and intimate glimpse into the inspirational friendship of two of the greatest British artists of the 20th century".

It is one of only two portraits of Bacon painted by Freud. The other was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin in 1988. Begun in 1956, it seems to show the late artist peering through a torn canvas.

In fact it was never finished because after six months sitting, Bacon refused to continue. It is said he left to chase his lover, Peter Lacy, to Tangiers.