VANITY FAIR ON ARTThe fraudster, a man
named Vincent Dyer,
claimed his father had been
given this picture by the
artist himself. In fact, it
turned out it was only a copy,
bought in 2012—though such
a good facsimile, the judge
pointed out, that experts
were asked to check if it was
authentic. The price tag was
a modest £3,000; but the
genuine work would be
worth tens of millions. This
little portrait is the missing
masterpiece of 20th-century
British art.
On May 27, 1988, someone
reached up and lifted it o
the wall of the Neue
Nationalgalerie in Berlin,
where it was on exhibition.
The portrait is—or was —a
tiny thing, only ve inches by
seven, small enough to slip
into a pocket or a bag. The
alarms were not set and the
picture was hanging from a
hook rather than screwed by
plates to the wall. Eventually,one of the guards noticed it was missing. It still leaves a
painful art-historical gap. From the vantage-point of the
second decade of the 21st century, Bacon and Freud seem like
twin pillars of British art—equivalent in stature to, though
dierent from, Turner and Constable a century before. In
November 2013 at Christie’s, New York, Bacon’s Three Studies
of Lucian Freud (1969) went under the hammer, eventually
fetching $142.4million (around £117million)—then the
highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction.T
he reason this triptych reached that—still astonishing—
record must have been, in part at least, because of the
subject. Here was a portrayal by one of the towering
gures in postwar London painting of the other. Yet Bacon’s
three-part depiction was not as famous nor as memorable as
that stolen Freud, which was a testament to the earliest and
closest phase of their relationship.
This was the time when Henrietta Moraes—Bohemian
xture of Soho drinking spots and failed cat burglar—
encountered Freud and Bacon. Moraes was drawn to these
two “young, not particularly well-known painters”; she was
attracted by “Lucian’s hypnotic eyes and Francis’ ebullience
and charming habit of
buying bottles of
champagne”. One evening,
while dancing with Freud,
she announced, “I want you”,
which resulted in a chaotic
aair and a ne picture:
Girl in a Blanket (1952).
Moraes was not quite
accurate, however, in her
description. It was true that
Freud was still young in the
early 1950s. But Bacon, born
in 1909, was already in his
40s, although—partly
through intensive, if
idiosyncratic use of
cosmetics, slathered around
his face like brushstrokes on
a canvas, plus boot polish
applied to his hair—he
appeared far more youthful
than he actually was.
Everything about Bacon’s
career, as he said himself, was
strangely “delayed”.
Although he was the elder by
some 14 years, Bacon’s full
emergence as a leading
painter was several years later
than Freud’s. He had made a
debut as an artist—a sort of
false start—in the early 1930s.
For a short while Bacon’s
work was exhibited and
praised, then—spooked by a
hostile review in The Times
and intensely self-criticalast May a 66-year-old man from
West London was sentenced to a
suspended prison sentence at
Isleworth Crown Court. His
oence was oering fake goods on
eBay. Neither of these facts, you
might think, is unusual
(particularly the second). It was
what the man was purporting to
sell that made this story national
news: a lost portrait of Francis
Bacon painted by his friend and
fellow artist, Lucian Freud, in 1952.
NOVEMBER 2019OPPOSITE: © HARRY DIAMOND/NPG PHOTO COLLECTION FREUD AND BACONTHIS PAGE: © THE LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES WANTED POSTERPOSTER BOY
Freud’s 2001 appeal for the return
of his portrait of Bacon11-19-Freud-Bacon-Gayford.indd 75 18/09/2019 09:27
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