Francis Bacon

"Her face would assume a look of extreme indignation, followed by one of raucous good humour, and then a glance of seduction, all dropped like masks and as readily replaced".

Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 1996, p. 205

A masterful essay on the analysis of facial landscape, Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne is a deeply personal portrayal of one of Francis Bacon's closest female friends. Bacon only painted a handful of female confidants, insisting that he must know his sitters intimately. Isabel Rawsthorne provided unique focus for the artist: she was his preferred female muse and inspired a greater number of small portrait canvases than any of his other friends, accounting for at least eighteen works between 1964 and 1983. From these, only three paintings in diptych format survive, amongst which the present work is outstanding. Bacon and Rawsthorne first met in the late 1940s at the home of Erica Brausen, who represented both artists at her Hanover Gallery in London. Painted decades later, Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne thus culminates nearly forty years of close friendship.

In the 1960s Bacon had commissioned John Deakin to photograph Rawsthorne so that he could paint from secondary images. As he told David Sylvester, "I've had photographs taken from portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from them. It's true to say I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I don't know. But, if I both know them and have photographs of them, I find it easier to work than actually having their presence in the room" (cited in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 40). Rawsthorne died at the beginning of 1992: the following May, Bacon divulged that they had had an affair and famously told Paris Match "You know I also made love to Isabel Rawsthorne, a very beautiful woman who was Derain's model and Georges Bataille's girlfriend". Bacon's relationship with Rawsthorne was thus singularly unlike that of any of his other female acquaintances.

Michael Peppiatt has described Rawsthorne's prodigious facility for physiognomic change: "Her face would assume a look of extreme indignation, followed by one of raucous good humour, and then a glance of seduction, all dropped like masks and as readily replaced" (Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 1996, p. 205). Bacon was inevitably seduced by this expressive variety and this diptych epitomises a rare mode of description that can only stem from a lifetime's worth of close observation. In 1984 Bacon told David Sylvester "I am certainly not trying to make a portrait of somebody's soul or psyche or whatever you like to call it. You can only make a portrait of their appearance, but I think that their appearance is deeply linked with their behaviour" (Francis Bacon in conversation with David Sylvester, 1984, Op Cit, p. 234). Rawsthorne described Bacon's paintings of her as "fabulously accurate" (quoted in Michael Peppiatt, Op Cit, p. 208), and this deeply personal work is the consummate conflation of her worldly exterior appearance and phenomenal interior character.

The painting schematises physiognomy in diagrammatic swathes, whose edges carve through an extraordinary orange ground. The heads loom like sculptures in paint, cut-out and superimposed onto the phosphorescent flatness of the fiery backdrop, which emphasises the geometric silhouettes. Throughout the work there is this tension between graphic dexterity and the raw power of colour, as is so typical of Bacon's most enthralling masterworks. For example, the seminal Three Studies for the Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion (1944, Tate Gallery) employs the same orange to amplify the existential angst of the screaming forms, and that same power is harnessed here to accentuate Rawsthorne's strident character. Within the circumscribed outlines of the two heads, Rawsthorne's idiosyncratic features - high forehead, long cheek-bones and arched eyebrows - are confidently scribed in flecked streaks and variegated smears of densely worked paint. Variance of expression is revealed through the veiled layers of shuttered, shocking pink hatching, rooted in the virtuosity of Edgar Degas' pastel technique (see fig. ), so that "sensation doesn't come straight out at you; it slides slowly and gently through the gaps" (Francis Bacon in conversation with David Sylvester, 1984, in David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 243).

The two faces' mirror-like appearance facilitates a wonderful interplay of dancing rhythms, which converse through both positive and negative space. The suggestion of perpetual reflection creates a dynamic energy flashing between the two canvases, constantly shifting the viewer's focus from one to the other. The very rare diptych format encourages a counter-balance relationship of mutual interdependence where rhythms resonate throughout the work, which is quite distinct from the central climax of Bacon's triptych form. It continues Bacon's interest in sequences of images, which found such strong analogy with the sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge that the latter provided almost constant sources of subject matter. It is critical to recognise the difference between the sequential and the repetitive: this painting provides both a progression and an implicit regression, exploiting the medieval motif of the diptych that assumes a reading from left to right. Having surveyed both images in both directions the viewer possesses a more complete experience of this extraordinary physiognomy.  

Born in London's East End in 1912, Isabel Nicholas studied at Liverpool Art School before briefly attending the Royal Academy in London. As a young girl she lived with and modelled for the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose Isabel of 1933 communes a hypnotic sexual allure. In 1934 she moved to Paris and started modelling for André Derain and Alberto Giacometti. She lived with the latter and his sculptures of her bear witness to a statuesque composure and almost celestial assuredness. She also befriended the poet Michel Leiris, who was the son-in-law of Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Picasso's famous patron. Her first marriage was to Sefton Delmer, a war correspondent for the Daily Express and together they reported on the Spanish Civil War.

Having divorced Delmer after the Second World War, she married the composer and conductor Constant Lambert. She had her first major solo exhibition in 1949 at the Hanover Gallery, where Bacon also exhibited, after which she designed stage sets, including at the Royal Opera House in 1953. Lambert had died in 1951 and in 1954 she married his friend, the composer Alan Rawsthorne. During the '50s and '60s she mixed in Soho circles along with Bacon at Muriel Belcher's "Colony Room" drinking club and "The George" pub. By the end of the 1970s her eyesight had deteriorated to such a degree that she stopped painting. In this context, Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne is not only the valediction to a truly epic life that spanned the devastating excesses of the Twentieth Century, but also punctuates the closing chapter of her own creativity as an artist.

Painted in 1983, the completed work was Bacon's gift to the three children of Dr Paul Brass, who, following on from his father Dr Stanley Brass, was Bacon's personal physician. It is tragic that Bacon died in Madrid of a heart attack in 1992 having been famously advised by his doctor not to travel. The artist maintained close ties with this family and in different ways this work thus records two of Bacon's most personal relationships.