£100,000 Bacon slice
ART lovers who own an amateur painter’s work are being urged to check because they may have missing segments of a Francis Bacon painting worth millions on the back.
Experts recently discovered six pieces from a version of Bacon’s famous Screaming Pope on the back of works by Lewis Todd with twee titles such as The Studio At Orchard Avenue.
They form part of Bacon’s painting Study After Velazquez’s Portrait Of Pope Innocent X. His Untitled (Pope) 1954, depicting a screaming pontiff, sold last November for a record £18.7million.
Todd, from Cambridgeshire, reused Bacon’s cast-offs and sold them at local exhibitions and craft markets. He was given the canvases by Bacon’s gallery on condition that he cut them up before painting on the reverse side.
It is fantastic to think that these pictures were once part of a much larger painting of historical importance.
The six pieces are expected to fetch more than £100,000 when they go under the hammer on March 20.
Surrey auctioneer Chris Ewbank said: “It is fantastic to think that these pictures were once part of a much larger painting of historical importance.
“It also leads to the intriguing speculation that there are more examples of Bacon’s paintings in existence used by Todd.”