Francis Bacon’s 1975 canvas Portrait of a Dwarf will lead Sotheby’s London evening sale on 16 October, carrying an estimate of £9m. The painting, which has not appeared on the market for four decades, is one half of a divided composition that once included Two Figures—a raw and intimate portrayal of Bacon and his lover George Dyer.
The two works began life as a single large-scale canvas, with Bacon setting two male figures within the cage-like space that defined many of his most emotionally charged paintings. The third presence on the original canvas, the dwarf onlooker, shifted the dynamic into narrative territory. For Bacon, this proved problematic. According to Michael Peppiatt, the artist’s biographer and close friend, Bacon cut the canvas in two, leaving behind two self-contained works.
Peppiatt, recalling the moment in the catalogue for Christie’s 2016 sale of Two Figures, described how Bacon first offered him the whole composition: “It was this huge canvas with two figures and a dwarf onlooker which I was very pleased with. Then Francis came round to my little flat one evening for drinks, and he took that back too. He felt there was too strong a narrative element in it, and he decided the best way to remove that was to cut the image into two self-sufficient, beautifully painted halves.”
The Two Figures section, acquired directly from Bacon, remained with Peppiatt until its sale at Christie’s in London in 2016, where it fetched £5.5m against an estimate of £5m–£7m. By contrast, Bacon retained Portrait of a Dwarf for himself, exhibiting it as “property of the artist” in several shows, most notably at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris in 1977.
The decision to keep the dwarf half suggests that Bacon saw in it something closer to the essence of his practice. Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s European chairman of modern and contemporary art, points to Bacon’s “profound connection” with Diego Velázquez, whose portraits of dwarves at the court of Philip IV of Spain—most famously Sebastián de Morra (c.1644) in the Prado, Madrid—offered an unflinching look at figures marginalised and objectified within royal culture. Bacon’s engagement with Velázquez reached its most famous expression in the Pope paintings, but the dialogue clearly extended further. In Portrait of a Dwarf, the subject is caught in Bacon’s merciless lens: isolated, intense, and disturbingly present.
The work now surfaces from a private collection where it has been held for 40 years. Its appearance comes at a moment when the market for Bacon remains robust, even as wider auction results show signs of recalibration. During the same sale, Sotheby’s will also offer Study for Self-Portrait (1980), estimated at £6m, alongside two bronze figures by Auguste Rodin—Jean de Fiennes, vêtu, Grand Modèle and Pierre de Wiessant, vêtu, Grand Modèle (conceived 1885–86, cast 1984), each guided at £600,000–£900,000.
The pairing of Bacon with Rodin underlines Sotheby’s intent to position the October sale, timed to coincide with Frieze Week, as a meeting ground of modernist intensity and contemporary resonance. Yet it is Portrait of a Dwarf that is expected to draw the most scrutiny, both for its provenance and for the unusual circumstances of its creation.
Bacon’s decision to slice through the canvas speaks to his restless process. He was known to destroy, abandon, or reconfigure paintings when they threatened to edge towards narrative or sentimentality. By halving the original work, he distilled two separate statements: one an expression of erotic intimacy, the other a chilling reflection of otherness.
Nearly 50 years later, the pieces stand as components of a lost whole, each carrying its own weight in Bacon’s oeuvre. With Two Figures already securely placed in the market, Portrait of a Dwarf emerges as both counterpart and counterpoint—an image that lays bare the brutal clarity of Bacon’s vision. Whether it reaches its £9m target will depend not just on market appetite, but on how far collectors are willing to follow Bacon into the most uncompromising reaches of his art.
Photo Courtesy Sotheby’s