STUDY FOR SELF-PORTRAIT, 1964

  • Study for Self-Portrait, 1964

    Study for Self-Portrait, 1964

    Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 140 cm

    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon, image repoduced for educational purposes only. 

    Study for Self-Portrait (1964) belongs to a period when Francis Bacon turned inward, dissecting his own image with the same unflinching intensity he once reserved for his sitters. Painted after the death of his close companion Peter Lacy, the work carries an air of grief and self-interrogation. Bacon’s face appears distorted yet recognisable, hovering in an indeterminate space, caught between presence and disintegration. The blurred contours and smears of flesh suggest both movement and decay, as if identity itself were collapsing under pressure.
     
    By 1964, Bacon’s self-portraits had become acts of psychological excavation rather than likeness. The studio mirror replaced the model, and the painter became his own subject of study. In this work, the brushwork feels instinctive and urgent, wrestling with mortality and memory. What emerges is not vanity but confrontation, a man facing himself stripped of artifice. The result is hauntingly direct, a portrait that feels less painted than torn from the surface of consciousness.

  • “I think of life as meaningless, but we give it meaning while we exist.”

     

    – Francis Bacon

    Death was never a distant idea for Bacon; it was the pulse beneath almost everything he painted. He saw it not as an endpoint but as the ultimate truth of existence, the shadow that gives life its intensity. In his work, death isn’t sentimental or tragic but physical, inevitable, sometimes even absurd. Figures dissolve, flesh mutates, time collapses; everything is caught in motion toward disappearance.