A painting by Francis Bacon sold last night at auction for £14.02 million (€21.2m), breaking all records for a work by an Irish-born artist.
Study for Portrait II, which was owned by actor Sophia Loren, had an estimate of €18 million before going under the hammer at Christie's in London last night, but was eventually bought for the higher price by a bidder who left the auction room without comment afterwards.
Bacon's painting was inspired by Diego Velazquez's 1650 Portrait of Pope Innocent Xand is regarded as the most important of Bacon's Pope series, of which there are about 50 surviving works.
Previous paintings inspired by Velazquez's work have fetched seven-figure sums at auctions in recent years.
Bacon admitted he had been obsessed by Velazquez's masterpiece, but where Velazquez's painting portrayed the power and majesty of a 17th century pontiff, the pope in Study for Portrait IIis a stooped and tragic figure.
The studio of Dublin-born Bacon was donated to the Hugh Lane Gallery on Parnell Square nine years ago. The gallery is now hoping that the painting's new owner will offer it on loan.
Gallery director Barbara Dawson said: "The Pope series of paintings are among the greatest masterpieces of the 20th century.
"We are now the world centre of Bacon study and it would be very pleasant to have an in-focus exhibition around this work."
The price for last night's painting easily exceeded the previous record of €11.5 million which was paid for Bacon's Version No 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringeat auction in New York in November.
Last night's record reflects an extraordinary buying frenzy among dealers on both sides of the Atlantic in recent months.
In November, Jackson Pollock's No 5, 1948 fetched a world record price of $140 million (€107.3 million) in New York, and records for other artists have been repeatedly broken in London this week. Sotheby's and Christie's, the two major auction houses, have between them sold almost €500 million worth of art in the last three days.
The identity of the buyer of Bacon's work was not known up to late last night.
