Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born[1] British figurative painter known for his emotionally charged raw imagery. He produced series of images of popes, crucifixions and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical cages, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work, which numbers c. 590 extant paintings along with many others he destroyed,[2] typically focuses on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His output can be broadly described as sequences or variations on single motifs; including the 1930s Picasso-influenced bio-morphs and Furies, the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures, the 1950s screaming popes, the mid-to-late 1950s animals and lone figures, the early 1960s crucifixions, the mid-to-late 1960s portraits of friends, the 1970s self-portraits, and the cooler, more technical 1980s paintings.

Bacon did not take up painting until his late twenties, having drifted in the late 1920s and early 1930s as an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler.[3] He said that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. From the mid-1960s he mainly produced portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single or triptych panels. Following the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971 (memorialized in his Black Triptychs, and a number of posthumous portraits of Dyer) his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death. The climax of his later period is marked the masterpieces Study for Self-Portrait (1982) and Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86.