Works by Francis Bacon have been big sellers at auction recently, and Christie’s sale of postwar and contemporary art here on Monday was no different. Four tenacious bidders vied for his “Three Studies for Self-Portrait” from 1975 in what became the evening’s longest bidding war, with two would-be buyers on the phone still running up [...]

Lucian Freud’s one-time muse was paid £20 a day to sit for a painting expected to fetch more than £17m.
But Londoner Sue Tilley said she did not do it for the money and had “lovely lunches” with the artist.
Freud’s 1995 work, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, looks set to become the most expensive painting by a living [...]