“When I die, my paintings won’t be worth anything, I’ll be forgotten,” Francis Bacon once told a friend. How wrong the artist, who died in 1992, was. One of his canvases was sold last night for £26.34 million, breaking the record for any postwar and contemporary work of art sold in Europe.

What he would have made of the fact that so many people wanted to attend this auction that bookings were required is anyone’s guess.

Almost 1,000 collectors, dealers and hangers-on descended on Christie’s in London to witness the sale as a barometer of the art market. After sipping water and juice in the foyer, they took their seats in three separate salerooms to watch the theatre of six-figure sums being tossed from one corner of the room to another. Despite worries in the City and the banking and credit crisis, those with an unquenchable thirst for modern art are not short of cash.

Months after coaxing collectors into paying £18.5 million for a Monet, Jussi Pylkkanen was back on the rostrum to sell Bacon’s Triptych 1974-77.

Things looked promising when a Cy Twombly as unprepossessing as a doodled scrawl sold for £3.94 million and an image of frolicking lovers by Gerhard Richter sold for a record £7.3 million. Fifty-four lots sold for more than £72 million in an hour.

But it was the Bacon that made everyone sit up. Triptych 1974-77, by a self-taught master who captured the pain of human existence, was the grief-stricken artist’s response to his lover’s suicide. The naked figure of George Dyer, a tortured man depicted with twisted flesh, reflects the tragic and ugly manner of his death, alone in a Paris hotel room that he and Bacon shared.

Bidding had opened at a modest £20 million. It leapt up by £500,000 before stalling at £21 million. Necks craned, hoping to spot a slight nod or a raised eyebrow in the crowd, a possible indication of a bid. All eyes turned in vain to the bank of telephones being manned by Christie’s staff. The world’s billionaires and millionaires insist on anonymity by bidding for their art over the telephone, and Christie’s had installed a row of 25 lines.

But, while some of those staff members were muttering figures down the line, they were not bidding.

Just as the auctioneer was threatening to bring down the gavel, a voice sounded from the back. Someone shouted that they were “bidding”. But again the figure stalled, at £23.5 million this time.

It was a long-haired young man standing in the crush of people in the doorway who claimed the final prize, after communicating with someone at the other end of his mobile phone. As the gavel came crashing down, he quickly melted away into the crowd outside, refusing to reveal his identity.

The total sale last night fell short of the record held by Sotheby’s since last year, when it sold Study after Pope Innocent X for a $52.68 million (£26.58 million).

Barry Joule, the artist’s friend — who donated 1,200 sketches by Bacon to the Tate in 2004 — told The Times yesterday that Bacon like to joke when one of his paintings sold, saying: “I hated the thing. I’m glad to see the back of it.”

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