A painting that Francis Bacon gave to Britain's Royal College of Art in lieu of rent is expected to fetch around €13.4m at auction.
Francis Bacon was offered working space at the famous London college after a fire destroyed his studio in 1969.
In return, he gave the institution the painting Study For Bullfight No 1.
When the painter requested that it was sent to New York for a Bacon retrospective in 1975, he gave the college a substitute in the form of Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light (1973-74), direct from his studio.
The work, part of a group of studies on the male nude, was so popular that the Royal College of Art asked to keep it instead.
The College is now selling the painting to raise funds for a major new campus in Battersea, south west London.
The painting will lead the Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale at auction house Christie's in London on 14 October.
Terence Conran, Provost of the College, said that Francis Bacon gave his blessing to the proposed sale before he died.
The artist was born in 1909 in Dublin to English parents and moved to London in 1926.
Although he had no formal training as an artist, he started to exhibit his work in the 1930s.
A decade later he became well known, causing sensation amongst the artistic community with his angst-ridden paintings of twisted and mutated forms.
He died of a heart attack in Madrid in 1992.
Today, his work is amongst the most popular of 20th Century art at auction. In May in New York, Study From Innocent X sold for $52.6m (€39.2m), establishing a world record price for the artist at auction.
