Damien Hirst was crowned the world’s most expensive living artist last night after a joust between two anonymous collectors sent prices soaring to balmy heights.

Lullaby Spring, a medicine chest, which can be mistaken for just that if placed anywhere other than an auction house or art gallery, sold for £9.65 million at Sotheby’s in London.

Just 24 hours after Lucian Freud became the most expensive living European artist at the rival auctioneer, Christie’s – with a portrait of Bruce Bernard that sold for £7.86 million – the enfant terrible of the art world snatched that moment of glory from him.

Hirst – who made his name by pickling a shark that is said to have sold privately for £6 million – also beat the world auction record held by Jasper Johns, whose Figure 4 of 1959 sold for £8.74 million in New York last month.

Collectors were determined to acquire a stainless-steel cabinet containing pills and capsules arranged neatly behind a glass sliding door, which Sotheby’s described as “a masterpiece . . . tackling the intrinsic frailty and vulnerability of life”.

Bidding opened at £2.3 million. Just when it seemed to stall at £5.4 million, one of the dozens of Sotheby’s staff members manning telephone lines to the biggest collectors shouted out that the bidder at the end of her phone wanted to play. And so it went on, until the gavel fell to loud applause.

The artist’s dealer, Jay Jopling, was on the phone throughout, perhaps to Hirst.

Dating from 2002, the cabinet is one of four versions that are said to explore the theme of the Four Seasons. Lullaby Winter broke Hirst’s auction record at Christie’s in New York last month, when it made £3.7 million.

While its pills are predominantly off-white to suggest the austere winter months, this one has “brightly-coloured tablets, capsules and lozenges in an allegorical celebration of renewed life”, according to the Sotheby’s catalogue.

It adds: “Standing before the pristine, clinical cabinet, the beholder is mesmerised in a kaleidoscopic display of complex colour harmonies.”

Collectors clearly were mesmerised, though the figure paid pales against the £50 million that Hirst wants for a new work, a diamond-encrusted skull. Hirst stole the show at a contemporary art sale that also saw an iconic Francis Bacon self-portrait of 1978, in which he depicted himself in a twisting profile, sell for £21.58 million – six decades after British galleries repeatedly turned down the gift of one of the 20th century master’s paintings.

Bidding opened at £6.5 million and within seconds, the price was rising in leaps of £250,000. Like a game of tennis, the bid was tossed between one telephone bidder and another. At £18.5 million, another telephone bidder suddenly decided to have a go. The final bidder also received loud applause.

Bacon would have been amused. He once said that he loathed his own face and painted it only because “I haven’t got any other people to do”.

The £21.58 million was the highest price of a record-breaking week of sales – the highest seen in Europe to date. In four days of auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, collectors parted with a staggering £414 million.

A final top-up of about £20 million is expected today with some more contemporary art offered at Sotheby’s.

In the same sale, five works were sold in aid of the NSPCC for a total of £1.5 million. This included one of Hirst’s splatter paintings, Beautiful Exploration of Vanity Painting (With Butterflies), which was bought by Mr Jopling for £1.14 million, against an estimated £350,000.

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