Executed in 1964, Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud exemplifies an iconic pairing of two of the most significant painters within the canon of twentieth-century art. Last seen by the public during a travelling exhibition in Hamburg, Stockholm and Dublin between January and May 1965, the present work is testament to Francis Bacon’s capacity to provoke emotion and capture in paint the complexities of the human psyche. Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud illuminates a powerful dialogue rarely matched in history: The great friendship and epochal rivalry between Bacon and Freud that lasted from 1944 until the apex of their artistic sparring in the mid-1980s. Though their visual styles differed considerably throughout their respective oeuvres, both painters were deeply committed to the human figure. They sat for each other on multiple occasions; Bacon painted Freud fourteen times between 1964 and 1971, in a combination of two small panels, four large panels (one destroyed), two small triptychs, three large triptychs (of which the present work was part) and part of larger compositions. Indeed, the present painting was originally part of one of only three full-length triptychs measuring 1.9 metres in height, depicting a restless Freud in alternating poses within differing architectural spaces. Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud is only comparable in its excellence to Bacon’s masterpieces Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach (1964, Moderna Museet, Stockholm), Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud (1966, Private Collection), and Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969, Private Collection).
The National Portrait Gallery, London
Image: © The National Portrait Gallery, London
“I realised immediately that [Bacon’s] work related to how he felt about life. Mine on the other hand seemed very laboured. That was because there was a terrific amount of labour for me to do anything – and still is. Francis on the other hand, would have ideas, which he put down and then destroyed and then quickly put down again. It was his attitude that I admired. The way he was completely ruthless about his own work. I think that Francis’s way of painting freely helped me feel more daring.”
Image: © John Deakin
Artwork: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022.
Bacon and Freud became close friends towards the end of the Second World War and were introduced by the English painter Graham Sutherland. As Freud later recalled, "I said rather tactlessly to Graham 'who do you think is the best painter in England?' he said 'Oh, someone you've never heard of; he's like a cross between Vuillard and Picasso; he's never shown and he has the most extraordinary life; we sometimes go to dinner parties there" (Lucian Freud quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Britain, William Feaver, Lucian Freud, 2002, p. 26). Bacon and Freud spent time in each other’s west London studios, they had dinner nearly every night for a lengthy period and frequented the great restaurants, bars and clubs of Soho together with friends such as Frank Auerbach, John Deakin, Michael Andrews, Timothy Behrens, Stephen Spender and Henrietta Moraes. Indeed, writer Daniel Farson recalled Bacon and Freud as being inseparable throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and Lady Caroline Blackwood remembered having dinner with Bacon nearly every night for the duration of her marriage to Freud, which lasted until 1959 (Caroline Blackwood quoted in: Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon Anatomy of an Enigma, London, 1996, pp. 192-93). In his recent memoir Michael Peppiatt recalled these lively, raucous dinners: “Lucian also clowns around, specially for Francis. One of his favourite turns is to pick up the restaurant bill when it comes, give it a cursory look and then pretend to faint, falling sideways on the banquette like Charlie Chaplin, while Francis chuckles and writes out a cheque… He is quite funny in an ironic way, with his lightly inflected patter doing quick pirouettes around the people he describes, but I think he is in awe of Francis, or even in love with him. But then I suppose most of us are, whether its Lucian or George or me, Sonia Orwell or models like Henrietta Moraes, or Miss Beston, who looks after everything to do with Francis at the Marlborough gallery… He is the point, whether we know it or not, around which we all turn” (Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir, London 2015, pp. 40-41).
Image: © Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Artwork: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2022
“Bacon made quite a few more portraits of Freud – fourteen between 1964 and 1971. They were all based on photographs by Deakin, which were found folded, torn, crumpled, and spattered with paint in Bacon’s studio after he died.”
Tate, London
Image: © Tate
Artwork: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022
Bacon executed his first portrait of Freud in 1951, Portrait of Lucian Freud (currently in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery, London) and would thereafter employ black and white photographs of Freud taken by their mutual friend John Deakin as source imagery. The figure’s pose in the present work is based on a photograph Deakin took of Freud sitting on a bed in 1964, the very same year the present work was executed. In the photograph Freud sits with his arms outstretched behind him, his fists clenched and white sleeves rolled up above the elbows. Freud’s pose in the present painting mirrors this position almost precisely. Bacon’s paintings of Freud from the 1960s were, in the words of Freud biographer William Feaver, “all closely informed by Deakin’s photographs of him, were systematically dramatised in the making. Bacon amplified the feel of shapes, exaggerating how it feels to sit, to slump, or to fidget to avoid a crick in the neck and cramp behind the knee. He loved a good whiplash assertion of fellow feeling. This often involved interchanged body parts” (William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011, London 2020, p. 588). Bacon’s frenetic emerald green, pink and white brushwork in the face of Freud on the surface of the present painting exemplifies this sense of dynamic, visceral movement – or whiplash – as Freud’s head appears to swivel quickly to the side, his body bent forward in tense aggression. From the 1960s onwards, Deakin would produce several photographic series of Bacon’s friends and lovers, among them Freud, Peter Lacy, George Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne, and Henrietta Moraes. Through the medium of Deakin’s photographs, Freud became a recurrent subject of Bacon’s paintings throughout the 1960s, and indeed one of the most significant.
Francis Bacon’s Triptychs of Lucian Freud
"[Both] images were on the edge, born of tension, frenetic in Bacon's case, drawn out in Freud's. Bacon's chance effects betoken exhilarated despair, whereas Freud's hard-won image is patinated with angst."
Image: © John Deakin
Artwork: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022.
The threatening pose of the sitter with his fists clenched is unique and rare among the large-scale portraits of Freud painted during this period. In the triptychs Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) and Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud (1966) Freud is seen equally restless and agitated, yet his positions are seemingly insecure and protected – legs crossed, arms folded, his body always angled slightly away from the viewer. In contrast, the present work illuminates Freud at his most confident, his chest bare and body open facing directly towards the viewer; Bacon’s thick brushwork shows Freud’s face spectacularly distorted, yet his eyes regard the viewer directly in a visceral glare. Bacon has positioned his subject directly in the centre of the composition, the viewer unable to escape Freud’s intense stare. It is no surprise therefore that Bacon’s powerful rendering of his friend and artistic foe in the present painting formed the central panel of the original triptych, a seminal anchor for the outer panels. Depicting Lucian Freud in a steady progression of nuanced poses, the triptych was broken up shortly after the 1965 travelling exhibition to Hamburg, Stockholm and Dublin, and the panels are now described as individual works in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, numbered 64-05, 64-06 and 64-07 respectively. The left panel, exemplifying Freud reclined towards the left side of the composition, remains in a private collection, while the right panel, showing the figure sitting to the right of the composition with his hand hovering around his face, resides in the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The two outer panels show Freud illuminated by suspended light bulbs which seem to glow against Bacon’s stark black ground.
Center: The present work.
Right: Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1964. Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Image/Artwork: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022.
Private Collection
Image/ Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images
The thick bands of exuberant and alternating colour on the surface of the present work unquestionably reveal the influence of the expansive colour-field canvases of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, which Bacon would have seen at The New American Painting exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1959. The broad, horizontal bands of black and sea green evoke Barnett Newman’s sublime vertical stripe or ‘zip’ paintings, such as Abraham (1949) and Concord (1948) which were both included in the 1959 Tate show. Such colouristic compositions clearly held enduring appeal for Bacon and the bands of colour on the surface of Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud help create an illusion of depth. Here, perspective is simplified into a confined, flattened space, the bench painted with swathes of rich sea green and positioned against a matte black ground. In rich blue and green hues, the lower third of the composition is thickly worked, and the imprint of corduroy can be seen across this highly textured area; Bacon employed corduroy as a painting material throughout his oeuvre, and the texture can be found on the door of his Reese Mews studio, which suggests the he applied the oil paint from the tube first to the studio door, and then printed the corduroy and set it against the canvas. These painterly passages recall the abstracted, spatially ambiguous compositions of Monet’s water lilies in an instantly recognisable colour palette of blue, green and lilac. As Martin Harrison writes in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, “The textured carpet is the closest Bacon came to reprising Monet’s Nymphéas” (Martin Harrison, ed., Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume III, 1958-71, London, 2016, p. 752). Bacon’s gestural daubs of oil paint are accented by flecks of white, the impressionistic surface fully recalling Monet’s celebrated triptychs such as Water Lilies (1914-26) now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image: © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Image: © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala, Florence
Artwork: © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko ARS, NY and DACS, London.
Bacon’s influence on Freud’s life and work was profound. As Freud recounted early in their friendship, “I realised immediately that [Bacon’s] work related to how he felt about life. Mine on the other hand seemed very laboured. That was because there was a terrific amount of labour for me to do anything – and still is. Francis on the other hand, would have ideas, which he put down and then destroy and then quickly put down again. It was his attitude that I admired. The way he was completely ruthless about his own work. I think that Francis’s way of painting freely helped me feel more daring” (Lucian Freud quoted in: Richard Calvocoressi, Lucian Freud on Paper, New York 2009, p. 11). Critic Sebastian Smee further describes Bacon’s impact on Freud: “But now, under Bacon’s influence, he stops drawing entirely and begins to loosen up his paintwork. He sticks to his incredibly slow and arduous way of working. But, like Bacon, he incorporates chance and risk, he smears and displaces the face’s fixed features, he utilizes all the viscosity and latent energy of oil paint applied by the brush” (Sebastian Smee, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals & Breakthroughs in Modern Art, London 2016, p. 87). Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud thus exemplifies Bacon and Freud’s great mutual respect for one another and a mutual appreciation for each other’s work.
Image: © David Dawson. All rights reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images
The present work dates from the most crucial period of Bacon’s career and life; he was gaining immense international recognition following a number of major museum exhibitions and his relationship with George Dyer was at full height. His artistic confidence throughout the 1960s is exemplified by the fact that some of his greatest self-portraits were executed during this highly successful and fruitful period of production. Painted obsessively, Freud’s likeness utterly dominates Bacon’s production. As resolutely indicated by this extremely rare and little-seen work, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon fuelled each other’s extraordinary talent, two masters of modern art at the apex of their ground-breaking, technical prowess. Lucian Freud was known to have been an avid collector of Bacon’s work, with works such as Head (1951, now in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art), Two Figures (1953, Private Collection), Figure with Meat (1954, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago) and Study for Portrait II (After the Life Mask of William Blake) (1955, Tate, London) remaining in his collection until his death in 2011. The present work thus exudes a sense of friendship, respect, rivalry and fervour that immortalised Bacon and Freud's deep infatuation with each other. A paragon of Francis Bacon’s encyclopaedic iconography and inimitable painterly style, Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud is a riveting masterpiece of the twentieth century.