Scrutinously modelled: as a painting of a supermodel joins fine twentieth-century works on offer in London, Old Masters and a Roman mosaic grace Palm Beach

Apollo, Feb, 2005 by Susan Moore

It is the stuff of every publicist's fantasy. Lucian Freud's portrait of Kate Moss brings together Britain's best known living painter and its most famous 'supermodel'. In this union of exquisite contradiction, a face and body made iconic through a million clicks of the photographer's camera is subject to the artist's famously slow, searing scrutiny. With an approach involving regular sittings over anything from six months to a year and a fierce analytical eye that regards his subjects as no different from slabs of meat, Freud's painstakingly wrought portraits are the very antithesis of the ephemeral world of fashion and its artifice and glamour. Better still, in this particular portrait the model is almost life-size, naked, and pregnant.

Naked portrait 2002 was born from a magazine interview in which Kate Moss stated that one of her remaining ambitions was to pose for Freud. The artist, apparently, could not resist the offer, despite, or perhaps because of, his aversion to professional (artist's) models--'they've grown another skin because they've been looked at so much', he has been quoted as saying--and to famous faces (although HM The Queen is hardly his only well known sitter). Perhaps Ms Moss had had enough of seeing herself as gorgeous and ethereal. No one could ever accuse Freud of flattery.

Freud began the portrait in 2001, starting with Moss's slightly rounded stomach so as to fix it in paint before it grew more swollen. Even so, the normally waif-like model is depicted as a substantial corporeal mass, her expression, unsurprisingly, resolute, and framed by Freud's whitening out of the canvas's corners. On completion, the portrait, which has never been publicly exhibited, passed to an American collector who is now selling it in Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art sale in London on 9 February. Given that Freud's auction records stand at the $5.8 million paid for his Large interior, W11 (after Watteau) at Sotheby's in 1998, this portrait comes to the block with an estimate of 2.5m [pounds sterling]-3.5m [pounds sterling].

In this month of Impressionist, Modern, Surrealist and Contemporary sales, Christie's offer another painterly tour-de-force in its evening sale on 7 February, Chaim Soutine's Le patissier de Cagnes, of 1922-23. Soutine painted three pictures of seated baker boys between 1919 and 1923, all of them, at different times, owned by Paul Guillaume. The dealer described his discovery thus: 'I had gone one day to see a painting by Modigliani at the painter's studio, when I discovered in the corner of the room a painting that overwhelmed me. It was a Soutine--which represented a baker boy, fascinating, real, vigourous and colourful, bearing a gigantic and superb ear, unexpected but just right; a masterpiece. I purchased it.' The American collector Dr Alfred Barnes saw it at the dealer's house and hailed it 'a peach' and bought it, thus reversing the artist's critical fortunes. Another version is in the Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris, and this one Guillaume sold to the novelist Somerset Maugham. Later it belonged to the no less celebrated director (and collector) Sir Alexander Korda. At its last public outing, for the Soutine retrospective at the Orangerie in Paris in 1973, the picture not only graced the catalogue cover but was splashed across town on the posters. Another dream ticket for the publicists. Estimate 3m [pounds sterling] - 4m [pounds sterling].

Sotheby's counters with a major Beckmann in its sale of German and Austrian Art on 8 February. Bold and richly allusive, Dame mit Spiegel (Lady with mirror) was painted in 1943 during the painter's fruitful but wretched exile in Amsterdam--he and wife arrived on the same day that the infamous 'Degenerate Art' exhibition opened in Berlin in July 1937 (estimate 2.5m [pounds sterling] 3.5m [pounds sterling]). Sotheby's also offers the intriguing collection of the influential dealer-cum-curator Jean-Yves Mock in a series of sales this season. Mock, alongside Erica Brausen, ran the avant-garde Hanover Gallery in London, 1956-73. On the block are works by the likes of Magritte, Man Ray, Nikki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. Two particular gems--drawings--are to be found in the Contemporary evening sale on 10 February. One is Andy Warhols' sensitively drawn Soupcan of 1962 which presages the famous Campbell's soup paintings shown in Los Angeles later that year--arguably his most important early drawing ever to appear at auction. I cannot see this selling within its 120,000 [pounds sterling]-150,000 [pounds sterling] estimate. The other is Roy Lichtenstein's exceptionally large Temple of Apollo (estimate 150,000 [pounds sterling]-200,000 [pounds sterling]).

Private buyers go on the offensive: results from the December and January sales

Dominating London's December auctions--in every sense--was the Badminton Cabinet, sold at Christie's on 9 December. Even those of us who had watched its rite of passage through the saleroom last time round, in 1990, when it was sold by the trustees of the Dukes of Beaufort to the Polish-born American baby-powder heiress, Mrs Barbara Piasecka Johnson, for a record 8.5m [pounds sterling], had not remembered the sheer physicality of the piece. Its monumental mass towers some twelve feet high and each of its constituent parts--the gilt-bronze figures, mounts and swags and glorious bravura pietra dura panels--are of astounding richness and technical virtuosity. Such quality defies vulgarity.