1. Francis Bacon
(Painting of “Francis Bacon” by Reginald Gray)
Francis Bacon was an Irishfigurative painter known for his bold, graphic and emotionally raw
imagery. He was born on the “28th October 1909 and died on 28th April 1992. Bacon's
painterly but abstracted figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages
set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. He began painting during his early 20s and worked
only sporadically until his mid-30s. Before this time he drifted, earning his living as an
interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. Later, he admitted that his career was
delayed because he had spent too long looking for a subject that would sustain his interest.
His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptychThree Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, and it was this work and his heads and figures of the late 1940s through to the
mid-1950s that sealed his reputation as a notably bleak chronicler of the human condition.
Study for the
Head I (1948) Head of George
Dyer (1966)
Head VI (1948)
(Arts Council of
England)