A painting by Francis Bacon that he gave to another artist in return for the use of his studio could fetch as much as £11 million at Christie’s next month. In 1951, grief-stricken at the death of his former nanny and companion, Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon left his flat in Cromwell Place, South Kensington, which they shared, and embarked on a nomadic existence, borrowing the studio of the Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, Rodrigo Moynihan, to work in. He used the studio for another two years, producing some of the most haunting images of his career, and exercising a powerful influence on the students at the college.

Study for Portrait was one of the last works he produced there. For Bacon, according to his biographer Michael Peppiatt, 1953 was an “annus mirabilis as inventive as it was prolific”. In spite of “flitting from debt to debt, and digs to digs”, he managed to produce more than 20 “majestic and terrifying” paintings including eight paintings of popes.

With the artist finding stimulation in adversity, Peppiatt concludes, “this was the period when Bacon acquired the means he needed to bring forth his vision.”

The subject of Study for Portrait is not known. The painting bears resemblances at once to Velazquez’s Portrait of Philip IV of Spain, to a photograph of Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, to the art critic David Sylvester and to Bacon’s lover at the time, Peter Lacy. Whoever it is, it is a figure of power, seated on a semi-gilded throne and staring menacingly down at the viewer from the dark, caged solitude in which he is trapped. Look closely at the darkness, and it is a vivid Prussian blue-black that recedes in tone to the depths of the unknown where the subject sits regally, his starched white collar and brilliant flesh tones glowing like a ghostly apparition.

At some point, the painting was acquired from Moynihan by the successful Irish artist, Louis Le Brocquy, known for his spectral paintings of Bacon, who in turn sold it to Marlborough Fine Art, which had become Bacon’s principal dealers.

In 1984 it was bought from Marlborough by the Swiss entrepreneur and wine producer Donald M Hess, who, though not identified as such by Christie’s, is the seller next month.