PORTRAIT OF HENRIETTA MORAES, 1963

  • Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963. Francis Bacon

    Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963

    Oil on canvas, 165.1 x 142.2cm 

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

    Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963, is one of Francis Bacon’s most striking and psychologically charged depictions of one of his closest friends and favourite models. Painted at the height of his artistic maturity, the work captures Moraes, a figure deeply embedded in Bacon’s Soho circle, with raw immediacy and emotional intensity. Her body, twisted and distorted in typical Bacon fashion, emerges from a dark, undefined space, the flesh rendered in expressive smears of crimson, mauve and cream.
     
    Bacon never painted Moraes from life; instead, he relied on photographs taken by John Deakin, which allowed him to manipulate and reimagine her form without restraint. The result is not a portrait in any traditional sense, but a study of energy, movement and sensation. Bacon’s Moraes is both vulnerable and defiant, her presence powerful yet dissolving into abstraction. The thick, tactile brushwork, paired with his characteristic sense of confinement, creates a portrait that is as much psychological as physical.

  • You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.

    - Francis Bacon

    The colour choices are central to the painting’s power. The purples and pinks feel almost too intimate, evoking the fragility of exposed flesh and the emotional charge of Bacon’s connection to his subject. Rather than beautifying the figure, the tones expose her vulnerability, transforming the portrait into something visceral and psychological. Through this controlled chaos of colour, Bacon captures not just Moraes’s physicality but the pulse of human existence itself, restless, tender and on the brink of collapse.