Spanish police hunt thieves who stole Francis Bacon paintings

Spanish police are hunting thieves who stole five paintings by Francis Bacon valued at upwards of €30 million from a home in Madrid.

The robbery took place in June 2015, but with the police determined to carry out a low-key investigation it has only come to light now, with El País newspaper revealing details of the case.

The paintings are portraits and landscapes and their owner, whose home they were taken from, has been identified as JCB, a 59-year-old man who was bequeathed the works in Bacon’s will.

The theft appears to have been carefully prepared by professional criminals, who broke into the flat, in a well-to-do district of central Madrid, taking the five paintings and some other objects. Neither the doorman of the building nor neighbours in it are thought to have seen or heard any suspicious activity that day.

"The robbery was very fast and quiet," El País reported. "The thieves took advantage of the fact that the paintings' owner was absent for several hours from his home . . . which is in a very secure and quiet area."

Dublin-born Bacon produced one of the most commercially valued bodies of work by any 20th-century artist. In 2013, a triptych he painted of his friend Lucian Freud was sold for $142.4 million (€128 million) in New York, which was at the time a record sum for an art auction.

"The circle in which you can sell works like this is very small," an art expert told El País, under condition of anonymity. "It's not easy selling a Francis Bacon, big or small, without news of it reaching other scouts in this special sector. The thieves aren't going to have an easy job."

Artistic heritage

Although Bacon was based in London, he made frequent trips to Spain, drawn by the country's lifestyle and artistic heritage. "He loved the heat, he loved the food, he loved the pictures, he loved the look of it," Janetta Parladé, a friend Bacon visited in southern Spain, told the New York Times.

He was a particular admirer of the work of Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez, which he first saw in Madrid's Prado Museum in 1956. Bacon also had a Spanish lover towards the end of his life whom the Sunday Times named in 2014 as José Capelo Blanco, a Madrid-based banker.

With the Spanish police refusing to give further details of the investigation into the robbery, it has not been possible to confirm whether the victim was Capelo Blanco, although his initials and age coincide with those released.

Bacon died at the age of 82 during a visit to Madrid in 1992. The Prado staged a retrospective of 76 of his works in 2009.