Francis Bacon paintings with Laois links sell for £24.3m at auction

A Francis Bacon triptych depicting his close friend has sold for £24.3 million – the highest value work sold in a Frieze season auction in the last 10 years.

The paintings, titled Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, come from the collection of American media executive William S Paley, who acquired the work from Malborough Gallery months after it was finished in 1963.

Moraes was a key figure in London’s post-war artistic landscape and acted as a muse for both Bacon and Lucian Freud.

On Friday, the triptych made its auction debut at Sotheby’s in London during a contemporary evening sale, which totalled £96.1 million – highest frieze week evening sale at Sotheby’s since 2015.

Until recently it was kept under the stewardship of the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York, where it stayed for more than 30 years following Mr Paley’s death in 1990.

There is Laois family connection to Bacon but a direct link to the paintings just sold for millions. 

Morates was painted Bacon portrayed her about twenty times during her bohemian days in London. She was a well-known bohemian character in London during the swinging 1960s who mixed with artists and Soho society but she died, poverty stricken, in a council flat in Chelsea, in 1999 aged 63.

In between her wilder years and her later days and free of intoxication but hampered by poverty, she lived at Roundwood House near Mountrath as a caretaker during the ’70s and ’80s, where she entertained such guests as Eric Burdon of The Animals, before her return to London.

Roundwood House was then owned by the Irish Georgian Society but is now owned privately.

Portrait of Henrietta Moraes which sold for £21.3 million in 2012.

Bacon himself developed deep regard and fondness for Laois as his grandmother Winifred Supple lived here. Her house near Abbeyleix contained bow-ended rooms which it is clamed echoed in the backdrops of Bacon’s paintings as a result of living with her for sometime in .

Born in Dublin in 1909, his family moved between houses in Laois, Kildare and Dublin.

Bacon, known for his bold and shocking figurative style, died aged 82 in 1992.

His work focused on the human form in an often brutal manner and included a number of triptychs, religious images of crucifixions and popes, and self-portraits.

Sotheby’s said proceeds from the sale will support various charitable organisations, including The Paley Museum, the Greenpark Foundation, and a new endowment at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art).

Further works will be sold at Sotheby’s to benefit charitable causes on Saturday.