Keen bids tipped for Bacon trio

Three paintings by Francis Bacon, including a portrait of a tortured-looking Peter Lacy, a lover of the artist, are expected to fetch more than $£1.5 million ($4.8 million) at auction in London next month.

Nearly 10 years after the death of Britain's finest post-war artist, competition is expected to be intense for Man in Blue VII, part of a series Bacon painted in the early 50s with Lacy as a model.

The tension-filled portrait shows the subject in a dark suit, standing as though in the dock of a courtroom. Bacon emphasises his subject's vulnerability by ghostly vertical stripes in the background, which resemble cell bars.

The 150cm by 105cm oil on canvas is estimated to fetch about £700,000 at Christie's on February 6.

A second, much smaller Bacon, a haunting and disturbing painting called Head and given by the artist to his friend, the writer Daniel Farson, in 1962, is estimated at up to £500,000. Farson, to his "lasting shame and regret", sold the painting in 1966 for £2400 when he found himself "in the doldrums".

A third Bacon, Portrait of a Man with Glasses IV, painted in 1963 and showing a distorted face reminiscent of the nanny shot in the head in the Russian film classic Battleship Potemkin, should make up to £400,000.

The Man in Blue portrait, for which competition is expected to be fiercest, was painted in 1954 while Bacon was staying in the Imperial Hotel, Henley-on-Thames, to be close to Lacy, who had a house in the Oxfordshire town.

Fernando Mignoni, a Christie's specialist, said: "This is Bacon at his most existential, painting the whole angst and fragility of life."

- INDEPENDENT