Tryptique, 1970, Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, grotesque, emotionally charged and raw imagery. His painterly abstracted figures are typically isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon took up painting in his early 20s but worked sporadically and uncertainly until his mid-30s. He drifted as a highly complex bon vivant, homosexual, gambler and interior decorator and designer of furniture, rugs and bathroom tiles. He later admitted 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 in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. Remarking on the cultural significance of Three Studies, the art critic John Russell observed that "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one...can confuse the two.

Francis Bacon was a member of a disparate group of Artists, termed collectively as the School of London in 1976. Other members included : Lucien Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and R.B. Kitaj. While their work was stilistically different, together they exprienced post-war London. What their work did share in common was the central role granted to the human figure in a city recovering from the devastation of war and the subsequent reconstruction.