LONDON.- An important painting by the British painter Frank Auerbach of his long-term lover, Estella Olive West, entitled Head of E.O.W. III, 1961, sold yesterday (30 June) for a remarkable £860,000 at Bonhams, New Bond Street, as part of its 20th Century British Art sale. The sale fetched an impressive £2.8 million in total. The painting, which has never appeared at auction before, had been expected to fetch £400,000 – 600,000. Estella, a widowed amateur actress, was Auerbach’s lover for 23 years, and one of his most regular models, referred to as E.O.W. in the titles of his works. It was with Estella that he started the process of working and reworking paintings, which sometimes took hundreds of sittings to complete. Estella once said of being a sitter: “It was quite an ordeal because he would spend hours on something and the next time he would scrap the whole lot down. That used to upset me terribly. I wondered