Study for Portrait VI

Francis Bacon

1953

Oil on canvas

Minneapolis Institute of Art

A portrait of a man in a dark suit and blue hat is depicted against a dark background with yellow geometric lines suggesting a room. The man's face is distorted and his mouth is open. The human figure was Francis Bacon's principal object of study throughout his career. This picture belongs to a series of eight paintings, which began as a portrait of Bacon's friend and biographer David Sylvester but became, in the final project, studies of a seated pope. They are inspired by the Velazquez 'Portrait of of Pope Innocent X' (Palazzo Doria, Rome), Eisenstein's Nurse in 'The Battleship Potemkin', and Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photos of the human body in movement. Bacon made his figures more and more agititated until, in the final painting, the pope is convulsive. Here his ambiguous facial expression rests somewhe