Sotheby’s announced today that Francis Bacon’s 1962 Study for aPortrait of P.L. will be sold in May in New York:

Psychologically arresting, this astonishingly-intimate portrait stands as a surviving eulogy of the artist’s ill-fated lover, Peter Lacy and summates a relationship that had a paramount effect on both Bacon’s life and work. Painted posthumously, just months after his early death from alcohol abuse in 1962, this homage is the most important and iconic portrait of Lacy ever created by Bacon and formally marks the direction of his work in the following decades. Until Sotheby’s pre-sale exhibitions began this month, Study for a Portrait of P.L. had not been seen in public since 1972