Bruce Bernard, who died in 2000, was a close friend of Lucian Freud and edited a series of books and monographs on the artist.
The two men met on the Soho scene and Bernard began socialising with the key affiliates of the "School of London" artists, a circle which included Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon.
The pair would drink regularly in Soho, along with Jeffrey Bernard, who was immortalised in Keith Waterhouse's play "Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell".
This work, painted in 1992, captures the casual intimacy between them, showing Bernard standing on the floorboards of Freud's studio in Holland Park, west London, with white rags that were used by the painter to clean his brushes, piled in a corner.
In July 2007 this painting was sold at auction for £7,860,000 ($15,625,680/ €11,624,940), a world record price at auction for any work by a living European artist.
This is a photograph of Francis Bacon,
taken by Bruce Bernard.
