Francis Bacon

Private Collection
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Important Modern Drawings, Paintings and Sculpture, 27 March 1957, Lot 123
Private Collection, London

Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, no. A13, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality tends more towards aubergine in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are artist's pinholes in places along the edges. Close inspection reveals a few thin and unobtrusive tears in places to the extreme outer edges, most of which are visible in the catalogue illustration. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Appearing for the first time on the open market since 1957, this painting is one of Bacon’s earlier works that survived the artist’s destruction of the majority of his pre-1944 paintings, and captures the artist’s early maturity and confidence in the handling of paint. Although he rapidly achieved critical acclaim for major Post-War paintings such as Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate Collection, London) and Painting 1946, which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York only two years after its execution, the artist remained extremely self-critical during these years. Bacon would ruthlessly destroy finished works throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s in order to ensure the high standards that he had set himself.

With the strong and almost monochromatic background against which the white subjects form a powerful contrast, Figures in a Landscape is characteristic of the artist’s idiosyncratic formal explorations of the 1950s. Having finished only fifteen canvasses between 1944 and 1950, Francis Bacon had at this stage achieved the technical skill and confidence that allowed him to elaborate on his extensive experimentation of the previous years in a celebrated body of work. Stripped down of all accessories, the artist’s confident output of this decade condenses his challenging subjects and formidable brushwork into a masterful synthesis of form and content. “No sides of meat, no bandages, no umbrellas or other props; simply a glimpse of mankind reduced to basic instinct, the mouth gibbering in fear or bared in attack, with the rest of the senses (and often, literally the rest of the head) obliterated” (Michael Peppiatt, Anatomy of an Enigma, London 2008, p. 153).

The candid and unadorned human presence of the two figures in the dramatic landscape marks the early phase of the artist’s stylistic development, which would become the defining subject of Bacon’s influential career. Having visited his mother in South Africa in November 1950, where he took photographs of the impressive landscape of Kruger National Park, it is not difficult to imagine the influence of the majestic savannah on the present work. The unspoilt environment of the African planes captured the artist’s imagination, and was translated four years later into the grassland in the foreground of Figures in a Landscape. Using a photograph as his source image, Bacon further distances the viewer from naturalistic realism, the loose application of paint delineating an almost abstract, ethereal landscape backdrop. The fact that the work must have been painted from a photograph that the artist took several years earlier, also attests to the influence of photography on the artist’s practice, which he preferred as a source over direct observation.

Through the elementary composition and restrained tonality, the artist’s fluid and subtly textured handling of paint is here powerfully emphasised. Francis Bacon’s superb technical skill and unrivalled mastery of oil paint had been recognised since his earliest exhibitions in the late 1940s, and are demonstrated in Figures in a Landscape. At the very early stages of his career, Bacon already explained that in his understanding, the best paintings make “the idea and technique inseparable. Painting in this sense tends towards a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa. Here the brushstroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in. Consequently, every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shape and implications of the image. That is why real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance” (Francis Bacon quoted in: Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, p. 13). Perfectly embodying the artist's ambition to forge an inextricably bond between content and form, Figures in a Landscape stands as an early testament to Bacon's pioneering treatment of subject and material.