pounds 2m tag puts Lucien Freud into the record books

A masterpiece by Lucien Freud is being offered at auction of around pounds 2m, making it the most expensive painting by a British artist alive today.

The work, Large Interior, W11 (After Watteau), painted between 1981 and 1983, is a monumental work inspired by Antoine Watteau's celebrated 18th- century painting Pierrot Content. David Lister, Arts News Editor, reports.

It will be offered for sale in New York in May by Sotheby's for an estimated price of $2.5-3.5m

The current auction record price for a work by Freud is pounds 892,500 ($1.4m) for a portrait sold last year. But Sotheby's experts claim that Large Interior is the artist's masterpiece and will fetch more than double that sum.

It will still not beat the record sum paid for a work by a living British artist, which is 5.7m dollars for Francis Bacon's Triptych May-June in 1989, when Bacon was still alive.

The painting went on view at Sotheby's in London yesterday. It comes from the collection of James Kirkman, Freud's dealer from 1972-1992, who acquired it directly from the artist.

Elena Geuna, the head of Sotheby's contemporary art department, said: "The appearance at auction of one of the most important British paintings of the last 50 years is an event of great significance."

Large Interior, which measures 73 inches by 78 inches, is a highly charged psychological group portrait in which, in the artist's own words, "intensity is the undercurrent" and where the sitter's gaze never meets that of the viewer.

The painting depicts four seated figures, one of which is the artist's daughter, fashion designer Bella Freud, playing the mandolin. Her audience is shown sitting huddled together in a tight group listening to the performance with faraway expressions on their faces, while a fifth figure, that of a small girl, is seen lying on the floor beside them.

In Large Interior, Freud transforms Watteau's depiction of love and jealousy into a sombre yet atmospheric scene of thoughtfulness and introspection.

Freud's idea of portraiture came from dissatisfaction with portraits that resembled people. He once said: "I would wish my portraits to be of people, not like them. Not having the look of the sitter, being them. As far as I am concerned the paint is the person."

The new record, if it is achieved, will add to the Freud mystique. The artist, grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of Sir Clement, is notoriously enigmatic and guards his privacy jealously.

Last year an unofficial biographer, Nigel Jones, abandoned a biography billed in a publisher's catalogue as investigating the "darker, hidden side" of the artist.

His publisher, Richard Cohen, said at the time: "There is something Nigel is afraid of and I would not want to expose him to any danger."

BEST OF BRITISH AnD WHAT THEY COST

Top prices paid for British contemporary art:

1. David Hockney: Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the semi Egyptian Style - pounds 1,204,819 in 1989

2. Lucien Freud: John Deakin - pounds 810,000 in 1997

3. Frank Auerbach: Mornington Crescent - pounds 357,143 in 1990

4. Malcolm Morley: Portrait of Vermeer - pounds 318,436 in 1992

5. Howard Hodgkin: In the Bay of Naples - pounds 289,474 in 1996

6. Leonora Carrington:

- Les Distractions de Dagobert. pounds 275,641 in 1995

7. Victor Pasmore: The studio of Ingres - pounds 200,000 in 1997

8. Leon Kossoff: Children's Swimming Pool - pounds 190,000 in 1992

Information: Art Sales Index