Paintings by a previously unknown British artist are
expected to fetch more than £100,000 at auction after it was discovered they
have works by Francis Bacon on the back.
The six
previously unseen pieces of work are thought to be part of Bacon's famous
Screaming Pope series from the 1950s.
Aspiring
painter Lewis Todd was given the canvases by his local Cambridge studio to
practise on.
Todd's family
discovered the fragments after this death in 2006 but it is not known how the
discarded Bacon paintings were originally acquired by the gallery.
Five of the
canvases have been authenticated by the Francis Bacon Authentication Committee
and will be sold by Surrey auctioneers Ewbank's on 20 March.
"Someone,
somewhere might even have a painting by Todd with a pope's head on the back of
it," said auction house owner Chris Ewbank.
"Anyone
who owns a painting by Todd should take it off the wall and check the back of
the canvas."
Bacon is known
to have preferred the unprimed reverse of canvases and often discarded works he
was not satisfied with.
Samples from
the paintings were collected and analysed by Northumbria University.
Preliminary results confirm that all pigments and binding medium used were
typical of Bacon works.
In 2007,
Ewbank's sold a group of damaged Bacon paintings found in a skip outside the
artist's London studio by electrician Mac Robertson.
They were
valued at £50,000 but the collection sold for £1.1m.
Francis Bacon
was born in Dublin in 1909 and worked on the Screaming Pope paintings for about
20 years.
Lewis Todd was
born in 1925 and was a graphic artist working for the Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries and Food and as a caricaturist for the Cambridge Daily News.
Source: BBC
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