STUDY FOR SELF PORTRAIT, 1980

  • Study for Self-Portrait, 1980, Francis Bacon

    Study for Self-Portrait, 1980

    Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30.5cm 

    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon, Image reproduced for informational purposes only. 

    Study for Self-Portrait, 1980, captures Francis Bacon’s haunting confrontation with self-image in the later years of his life. The painting shows the artist’s face dissolving into a haze of flesh tones and shadow, set against a muted turquoise background that gives the work a cold, detached stillness. The features are blurred almost to the point of abstraction, the mouth and eyes half-lost in movement, suggesting both the instability of identity and the erosion of time.
     
    The soft, powdery texture and restrained palette lend the portrait a spectral quality, as though Bacon’s presence is slipping away even as he paints it. Dressed in a crisp white collar and tie, he appears formal yet fragile, a ghost of himself, caught between visibility and disappearance. Study for Self-Portrait reveals Bacon’s enduring fascination with mortality and the disintegration of the human form, turning his own face into a study of impermanence and the fleeting nature of existence.

  • If I didn’t have to live, I’d never let any of it out.


    - Francis Bacon

    By the time Francis Bacon painted Study for Self-Portrait (1980), mortality had become the dominant force in his work. Having lost many of his closest friends and lovers, including George Dyer nearly a decade earlier, Bacon increasingly used his own image as a means of confronting death. His self-portraits from this period are not acts of vanity but meditations on decay and impermanence. He once said that he painted himself because “people around me are dying like flies,” and these late works bear the weight of that loss.