Bacon's portrait study sold to New York dealer for record £14m

One of the most important paintings by Francis Bacon to be placed on the open market was sold at Christie's last night for £14m, easily exceeding the previous record of £7.9m paid for one of his works in November.

Study for Portrait II, painted in 1956, becomes the second most expensive work of art produced since the Second World War to sell at auction. It was bought by the New York-based art dealer Andrew Fabricant on behalf of the Richard Gray Gallery, of which he is a director.

The painting is one of a series of acclaimed popes by Bacon and was shown during an exhibition of British art on a US tour in 1963. Its only other brief public outing was in Milan 20 years later.

It had then been part of a little-known collection built by Sophia Loren's late husband Carlo Ponti, the film producer. He died days after Christie's announced the sale last month.

Pilar Ordovas, head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie's in London, said: "We are thrilled with these record-breaking results. In particular, we are delighted with the result of Bacon's Study for Portrait II which realised a record price, establishing Bacon's position as one of the leading artistic figures of the 20th century."

Bacon was obsessed by Diego Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X in 1650 and thought it was "one of the greatest portraits that has ever been made". He produced more than 50 paintings of popes and destroyed several of them. Study for Portrait II was one of two painted after his return to London from Morocco, where he had spent time with his volatile alcoholic lover, Peter Lacey.

Bacon, it is said, finally realised that Lacey was doomed and this could be one reason why he painted this pope as a tragic hero brought down by outside forces, different from his "screaming Popes" of the early 1950s.

Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents. He had little conventional schooling and no formal training in art.

Thrown out of the house at 16 because he was homosexual, he moved to London where he had limited success with his early paintings, most of which he destroyed. By the mid-1930s, he was disillusioned with art and after 1937 he dropped out of the scene until 1945.

In that year, he became famous. His Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion caused a sensation with its imagery of half-human, half-animal creatures. By the time he died in 1992 he was regarded as one of the greatest British artists of the 20th century.

The former record for a Bacon painting was $15m (£7.9m) for Version No 2 - a figure lying with a syringe - set at Sotheby's New York in November. The record price for a post-war work of art is $27m for Untitled XXV by Willem de Kooning, at Christie's, also in November last year.