Francis Bacon series of Henrietta Moraes sells for £24.3million

Francis Bacon series of paintings of legendary Soho 50s beauty Henrietta Moraes sells for £24.3million

• His paintings were highest value work sold at a Frieze season auction in 10 years 
• The portraits come from the collection of US media executive William S Paley
• Henrietta Moraes acted as a muse for both Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud

A Francis Bacon series of paintings of legendary Soho 50s beauty Henrietta Moraes sells for £24.3million.

The paintings were the highest value work sold in a Frieze season auction in the last 10 years. 

The three portraits 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

The triptych made its auction debut at Sotheby’s in London during a contemporary evening sale on Monday. 

The Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes by Francis Bacon sold for £24.3 million

Until recently the work 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.

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).

The half-Indian model, who died in 1999, was brought to England as a small girl by her mother, after her father, who was in the Indian Air Force, walked out of the family home in the foothills of the Himalayas after a marital row

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

Born in India in 1931, Henrietta was one of the stars of the demi-monde that drank in London’s Soho and bedded each other in the Fifties.

The half-Indian model was brought to England as a small girl by her mother, after her father, who was in the Indian Air Force, walked out of the family home in the foothills of the Himalayas after a marital row.

The two of them went to live in Northamptonshire, with Henrietta sent to boarding school at the age of three.

Her mother abandoned her after running away to South Africa and leaving her with her grandma who badly mistreated her. 

Bohemian: Henrietta Moraes with Patrick Procktor, a friend of late artist Francis Bacon

She was shipped off to a convent in Reading and developed a crush on a girl called Valerie who slept with T.S. Eliot’s poems under her pillow. 

Henrietta Moraes drunk regularly in her teenage years and wined and dined at the Colony Room, the Gargoyle Club, the French House . 

During this point she met Francis Bacon who was one of the few admirers she did not sleep with. 

But the famous artists did paint her at least 16 times over a period of some 20 years — the portrait sold for £21million was painted in 1963 — and he drank with her every night in the Soho clubs.

Henrietta, perhaps realising the potential profit to be made, continued to complain about this until the end of her life.

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