Francis Bacon - Human Presence

Francis Bacon - Human Presence

📍Location: National Portrait Gallery

❤️Favourite Artwork: Self Portrait (1972) - Image #38

🏷Favourite Name for Artwork: Study for portrait (with two owls) - Image #3

💡Tattoo Inspiration: Something in Viridian Green - Slides 11-12

📜What I learnt:

  • Francis Bacon (1909-92) was born into a wealthy family in Dublin, raised primarily by his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot whom he stayed in contact with, after leaving home at 16. He travelled to Berlin and Paris, and then London, finding notoriety as an Interior Designer.
  • Often used the ambiguous title ‘study for...’ alluding to unfinished realisations
  • Contemporaries - Picasso, Giacometti, Freud
  • He was obsessed with Diego VelĂĄzquez’s painting ‘Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ and used it as the subject of many paintings, despite only ever having seen colour copies
  • He described screams as “The glitter and colour which comes from the mouth” - see image #4

  • He had a similar fascination with Van Gogh, recreating his 1888 work ‘The painter on the road to Tarascon’ the figure in which Bacon described as ‘a phantom of the road’,
  • Bacon also only saw a colour depiction of this painting, assumed destroyed by the Allied Forces bombing in Dresden, 1945.
  • He immersed himself in Van Gogh’s published letters to his brother, Theo.

  • Another fixation of Bacon’s was James Deville’s ‘life-mask’ of William Blake, of which he owned a replica.
  • Deville was interested in Phrenology, a now discredited pseudoscience that measures bumps on the skull to predict a person's mental traits and personality.

  • ‘Self-portrait with beret - 1659 (Rembrandt)’ was another painting Bacon fixated on, he pinned many images of it to the wall of his studio.

  • He revisited another VelĂĄzquez piece as inspiration for his depiction of Henrietta Moraes.

  • R.J Sainsbury (of supermarket fame) was a patron - his portrait (#15) is the only commission piece Bacon completed from life. #14, of Lisa Sainsbury, R.J.’s wife, was a gift from Bacon in thanks for their support

  • He was friends with other prominent artists, such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach

  • He described the vertical striations on his paintings as “shuttering”, alluding to x-rays or photography

  • The veridian green in his paintings from the last 1950s onwards was likely influenced by the interior of ‘The Colony Room’ a club in Soho he frequented, describing it as a place “to lose your inhibitions...to go where one feels free and easy”.

  • He didn’t like painting from life, and stopped doing so almost altogether post 1959 

  • Depictions of his lover, George Dyer, became more fractured throughout their relationship.
  • George died of a drink and drug overdose in Paris 1971, two days before the opening of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais.
  • Bacon’s triptych (#35) was a posthumous depiction of his suffering, the only work which he accepted would be read with a strong narrative.

  • Bacon was fascinated by photographs of himself, and enjoyed sitting for portraits.
  • He was friends with many photographers, including Cecil Blake, whom he once painted but destroyed it upon seeing Blake’s reaction to it.

Images - Artist Francis Bacon, unless stated otherwise

01 - Portrait of Pope Innocent X- 1650 (Diego VelĂĄzquez)

02 - Study for Pope I - 1961

03 - Study for portrait (with two owls) - 1963

04 - Head VI - 1949

05 - Study for a portrait of Van Gogh IV - 1957

06 - The painter on the road to Tarascon - 1888 (Vincent Van Gogh)

07 - Study for a portrait of Van Gogh VI - 1957

08 - William Blake - 1823 (James Deville)

09 - Study for portrait II (after life mask of William Blake) - 1955

10 - Self-portrait with beret - 1659 (Rembrandt)

11 - Francis Bacon - 1962 (Irving Penn)

12 - Henrietta Moraes - 1966

13 - The toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus) - 1647-51 (Diego VelĂĄzquez)

14 - Sketch for a portrait of Lisa - 1955

15 - Portrait of R J Sainsbury - 1955

16 - Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in Soho - 1974 (Harry Diamond)

17 - Triptych: Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud - 1965

18 - Study for a portrait of Lucian Freud - 1964

19 - Double portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach - 1964

20 - Man in Blue I - 1954

21 - Study of figure in a landscape -1952

22 - Head (man in blue) - 1961

23 - Muriel Belcher; Francis Bacon - 1975 (Peter Stark)

24 - Three studies of Isabel Rawsthorne - 1967

25 - Three studies for a self-portrait - 1967

26 - Head of a man - 1959

27 - Head of Boy - 1960

28 - Head of a man - 1960

29 - Sleeping figure - 1959

30 - Seated figure - 1961

31 - Portrait of a man walking down steps - 1972

32 - Three studies for portrait of George Dyer (on light ground) - 1964

33 - Portrait of George Dyer riding a bicycle - 1966

34 - Portrait of George Dyer in a mirror - 1968

35 - Triptych May-June - 1973

36 - Study for self portrait - 1963

37 - Self portrait - 1973

38 - Self portrait - 1972

39 - Three studies for self portrait - 1980

40 - Study for self-portrait - 1979

41 - Francis Bacon - 1967 (J.S. Lewinski)

42 - Francis Bacon - 1975 (Arnold Newman)

43 - Francis Bacon at 7 Reece Mews - 1973-5 (Peter Stark)

44 - Francis Bacon - 1963 (Bill Brandt)

45 - Francis Bacon at the Marlborough Gallery in London - 1986 (Guy Bourdin)

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