Late Career

Man at Washbasin

Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30.5cm

©The Estate of Francis Bacon, Image reproduced for educational purposes

Francis Bacon’s late career, spanning the 1970s to the early 1990s, reveals an artist turning inward, more reflective, yet no less intense. Having endured profound personal loss, including the death of his partner George Dyer, Bacon’s work became quieter in tone but deeper in feeling.

The screaming violence of his mid-career paintings gave way to restraint, clarity, and solitude. His figures, often isolated within sparse, geometric spaces, seem suspended between presence and disappearance. These late works capture Bacon at his most contemplative, confronting ageing, memory, and mortality with the same unflinching honesty that defined his life’s work.

*Images repoduced for educational purposes
“We are born with nothing and we die with nothing, and in between we create a great deal of unnecessary pain for ourselves.”

- Francis Bacon

In these final years, Bacon returned repeatedly to familiar subjects, self-portraits, close friends such as John Edwards, and studies of anonymous figures in sparse interiors. Death and time linger heavily over these works, but they are not without tenderness. The self-portraits in particular show a man confronting his own mortality with honesty rather than despair. Even in his eighties, Bacon continued to evolve technically and emotionally, painting with precision and vitality until his final days. These late works stand as the culmination of a lifetime spent translating the brutality and beauty of being human into paint.
“I think of life as meaningless, but we give it meaning while we exist.”

- Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon died on 28 April 1992 in Madrid at the age of 82, following a short illness brought on by respiratory failure. He had travelled there to visit a close friend, the Spanish banker José Capelo, and was admitted to hospital soon after arriving. Even in his final months, Bacon had remained remarkably active, continuing to paint and exhibit internationally, his energy and discipline undiminished by age.

His death marked the end of one of the most uncompromising careers in modern art. Bacon left behind a body of work that confronted mortality with an honesty few artists have ever matched. Having spent his life painting the vulnerability and violence of existence, his own death carried a sense of grim inevitability, the final act in the drama he had spent decades depicting.