Francis Bacon: A Very Human Presence

F rancis Bacon’s complex approach to portraiture might best be illustrated by the story of the Sainsburys. In the spring of 1955, Bacon painted supermarket supremo Robert Sainsbury in what was the artist’s first commissioned portrait. The magnate was relaxed and hardly expecting to be buttered up through paint. But, no doubt, even Sainsbury was surprised when Bacon reworked his second picture of him into a creepy portrait of a chimpanzee.

Portraits of both Robert Sainsbury and his wife Lisa are some of 50 works on view in Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Amazingly, this is the first show dedicated to Bacon’s work to be staged at the NPG. It is also the first blockbuster show orchestrated by Victoria Siddall, the gallery’s newly appointed director, who took up the prestigious post this autumn following her tenure as global director of Frieze.

The NPG presents works by Bacon, on loan from both private and public collections, dating from the late 1940s through to the end of the painter’s life in the early 1990s. It chronicles the ebb and flow in his abstract treatment of appearance and is structured around five themed spaces: Portraits Emerge, Beyond Appearance, Painting from the Masters, Self Portraits, and Friends and Lovers. The one constant is the manner in which Bacon made one of the most conventional of genres profoundly unconventional.

“Francis Bacon was deeply engaged with portraiture, challenging long-established expectations of what a portrait should entail,” notes Rosie Broadley, Senior Curator of 20^th Century Collections at NPG. “For him, it was the pre-eminent painting genre, capable of expressing what it meant to be human.” But, of course, Bacon’s view of humanity didn’t always tally with the view of others. To sit for Bacon could be an exercise in anti-vanity.

The exhibition’s curatorial team describe Bacon’s approach to a face as “transcending likeness.” The artist couldn’t have agreed more. “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery,” Bacon once noted. “I would like my pictures to look as if a human head had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of human presence and memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime.” He presented his sitters as X-Rays, caged creatures and spirit forms.

The gallery has gathered together portraits from all areas of Bacon’s life. There are friends from his Soho days, such as the hedonistic model Henrietta Moraes, and Muriel Belcher, the acid-tongued proprietor of the Colony Club. Famous subjects include the society snapper Cecil Beaton and the painter Lucian Freud, both of whom, in turn, depicted him in their work. And then there are his lovers, from his early infatuation Peter Lacy through to John Edwards, his late-life companion. And George Dyer, the rough and ready burglar-turned-muse who became his most famous paramour, is well represented here, always recognisable by his spry, prominent nose.

Bacon rarely painted from life, treating the genre more as an experimental practise than one of observation. And he considered art historical subjects ripe for reinterpretation: at the NPG visitors will discover his reworking of Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X and the sorrowful features of Vincent van Gogh.

Celebrated photographers – from Irving Penn to Cecil Beaton – snapped Bacon during his lifetime, posed in interiors or candid out and about in London and Paris. The NPG has included many of these prints, providing a supplementary survey on the artist’s everyday life.

Beaton shot him both in the formal Victoriana of his home at 7 Cromwell Place – formerly the residence of the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais – and in the chaos of his trash-strewn studio (he looks happier in the latter). And photographers of mid-century Bohemian London, such as Harry Diamond, Bruce Bernard and John Deakin, documented him carousing the bars north of Piccadilly with Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.

Ultimately, perhaps, Bacon’s most demanding sitter was himself. “I don’t think I’ve known anybody more self-critical than Francis,” stated Lisa Sainsbury. Like Rembrandt, Bacon had an eye for his own flaws. He painted his last self-portrait in 1990, by which time the octogenarian painter was ailing and lonely. In it Bacon’s head wobbles and warps, isolated in blank black space. It was more of a mask than a face, noted his biographers Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan: “the eyes were thumb-punched sockets, the features a series of soft swirls.” It was, appropriately, a self-portrait that slipped away from the self.

Francis Bacon: Human Presence is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 10 October until 19 January 2025. The exhibition is proudly supported by Sotheby's.

National Portrait Gallery

Francis Bacon at the National Portrait Gallery

10 October 2024–19 January 2025