Christie's auction house in London broke their European record on Thursday (February 13) when it sold a celebrated painting by British artist Francis Bacon for 42 million pounds (70 million US dollars).
Earlier estimates had put 'Portrait of George Dyer Talking', a painting of Bacon's lover and muse, at 28 million pounds (47million US dollars).
But the auctioneer brought down the hammer after it soared 12 million above the estimate selling to an anonymous telephone buyer. The auction house said it was the most valuable piece it ever sold in Europe.
Christie's drew attention to the booming art market in November last year when it sold Francis Bacon's "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" for 142.4 million US dollars, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.
The world's most expensive painting is the 'Card Players' by Paul Cezanne which sold for 250 million US dollars in 2011.
Christie's said the "Portrait of George Dyer Talking" from 1966 is one of the most famous images of Bacon's lover and was exhibited at his Retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971.
The Irish-born Bacon met Dyer in London's Soho district in 1963, drawn to him by his fragility and need for protection. An anxious, constant smoker and problematic drinker, Dyer went on to dominate Bacon portraits for the rest of the decade.
Dyer committed suicide in 1971.
The tumultuous relationship between Dyer and Bacon was the subject of the 1998 BBC film "Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon", starring Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig.
The "Portrait of George Dyer Talking" was last auctioned at Christie's in New York in 2000, raising 6.6 million US dollars, a record prize for Bacon at the time.
Bacon, famed for his graphically abstract and emotionally raw paintings, existentialist views and hard-drinking, bon vivant lifestyle, died in 1992 at the age of 82.
