Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter  who became famous for his bold, raw, graphic style and distorted images of people. He specialised in abstract portraits and isolated figures with grotesquely distorted faces and twisted body parts. Margaret Thatcher once described him as "that man who paints those dreadful paintings". At 16 he was kicked out of his family and arrived in London. A year later a Picasso exhibition in Paris inspired him to take up painting although he didn't commit himself to it until his mid-30s. His breakthrough came in 1944 with his triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion which affirmed his reputation as "a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition". Some key features of his work include male heads isolated in rooms (1940s), screaming popes (early 1950s), animals and isolated figures trapped in glass or steel geometrical cages (mid to late 1950s) and modern variations of the crucifixion (early 1960s). From the mid-1960s to early 1970s Bacon mainly produced portraits of friends. His work then began to focus on portraits of his lover George Dyer. Following Dyer's suicide in 1971 Bacon became very depressed and his work became more personal and took on a morbid tone.

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• Figures in a Landscape
• Date: 1956
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions:150 x 107.5 cm
• Collection: Birmingham Museums Trust

Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake)

• Date: 1955
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 61 x 50.8 cm
• Collection: Tate

Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII)

Date: 1955
Medium: Oil on canvas, mounted on hardboard
Dimensions:108.6 x 75.6 cm
Collection: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/search/painted_by/francis-bacon_artists