London’s National Portrait Gallery Opens First Francis Bacon Show

Opening this week at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Francis Bacon: Human Presence examines the professional and personal development of the provocative portraitist through dozens of paintings, some rarely exhibited to the public. The Francis Bacon show runs from October 10 to January 19, 2025.

The British-Irish painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) believed portraiture was the greatest genre of painting for its unmatched potential to explore and express what it means to be human. At the same time, he famously rebelled against every one of the genre’s long-held Western traditions. In the 1940s, Bacon barrelled onto the post-war London art scene with a shocking series of anonymous screaming heads. In the decades that followed, his portraits never failed to spark strong reactions.

Writhing limbs, distorted faces, and violently expressive colors and brushstrokes define Bacon’s distinctive 20th-century paintings. Presented by London’s prestigious National Portrait Gallery, Francis Bacon: Human Presence is the first major exhibition in almost twenty years to focus on the artist’s unique and often unsettling portraiture. Showcasing over 55 paintings, it is also the National Portrait Gallery’s first-ever Francis Bacon show.

Bacon’s Personal Portraiture

Francis Bacon frequently painted portraits in direct response to artists he admired, from Rembrandt to Velazquez to Van Gogh. He also repeatedly portrayed his closest friends and favorite drinking companions, including Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes, and Isabel Rawsthorne. Among Bacon’s most evocative works are his portraits of his lover George Dyer, who dominated Bacon’s later oeuvre and tragically died by suicide in 1971.

In addition to painting conventional single portraits, Bacon often approached his subjects serially. He painted several diptych and triptych portraits that capture the complexities of his closest relationships. For example, Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne (1967), which the National Portrait Gallery borrowed from the National Gallery in Berlin for the exhibition, “is one of his more complicated compositions,” explained Rosie Broadley, a curator of the Francis Bacon show. “In it he is thinking about reproduction and revisiting versions of a person that he’s made in a [previous] portrait.”

Staging a Francis Bacon show at the National Portrait Gallery in London “has been on the cards for a while,” Broadley told The Art Newspaper. “We wanted to reserve it until after the reopening of the gallery [in 2023] and then make a real splash with a major British artist.” Francis Bacon: Human Presence opens to the public on Thursday, October 10. It runs through January 19, 2025.

“I hope this exhibition returns a bit of warmth to the topic,” Broadley continued. “Bacon was sensitive and passionate and loving but also sometimes vicious and angry. Emotion is so important in his work and sometimes, in intellectualizing it, it loses something.” Despite Bacon’s transformative influence as a post-war portrait artist, his work is not represented in the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection. “The people he paints are not the people who fit the Portrait Gallery’s collecting criteria,” Broadley explained. The museum’s collection of photography, on the other hand, includes multiple portraits of Francis Bacon, as he enjoyed posing for photographs.