Freud portrait fetches top price

“Man With a Feather,” a surreal 1943 self-portrait by Lucian Freud that shows the artist holding a feather in front of a yellow London house, sold for $6.7 million at auction Wednesday.

That was the top price in an event that totaled $35.3 million for Sotheby’s Holdings Inc. But Freud’s “Ali,” a 1998 portrait of the artist’s son, failed to sell.

David Hockney’s 1963 “Seated Woman Being Served Tea by Standing Companion,” in which a colored curtain forms a backdrop to the domestic scene, designed to look like a tapestry, sold for nearly $3.3 million.