Francis Bacon: Human Presence

This book explores Francis Bacon’s deep connection to portraiture and how he challenged traditional definitions of the genre.

From his responses to portraiture by earlier artists, to large-scale paintings memorialising lost lovers, works from private and public collections showcase Bacon’s life story. As well as the artist’s self-portraits, sitters include Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer.

This is the first publication in over 20 years dedicated to the portraits of Francis Bacon. From his renowned triptychs and paintings of ghostly figures, to tender and psychologically revealing individual portraits, the figurative works displayed in this publication chart the development of a groundbreaking artist, highlighting the influence of his peers and other artists.

Edited and with introductory texts by National Portrait Gallery curator, Rosie Broadley, Francis Bacon: Human Presence also features biographies and photographs of Bacon and his circle, bringing lesser-told stories to the fore. A series of short essays from a range of contemporary thinkers and experts on Bacon explore the individuality of the artist through different lenses, providing fresh perspectives on the artist, his portraits and his world.

About the Author

Rosie Broadley is Senior Curator, 20th-Century Collections, at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She has contributed to publications including Paul McCartney 1964: Eyes of the Storm (2023), BP Portrait Award 2018 (2018), Suffrage and the Arts: Visual Culture, Politics and Enterprise (2018) and Laura Knight Portraits (2013).

Richard Calvocoressi is a scholar and art historian. He has served as a curator at the Tate, London, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and director of the Henry Moore Foundation. He joined Gagosian in 2015. Calvocoressi’s Georg Baselitz was published by Thames and Hudson in May 2021.

James Hall is an art critic, historian, lecturer, and broadcaster. He was formerly chief art critic of the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He contributes to The Guardian Saturday Review, The Times, and Times Literary Supplement, and is the author of several books, including The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History.

Martin Harrison is one of the foremost scholars of Francis Bacon, and the editor of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (2016). His first publication on Francis Bacon was Points of Reference (1999), while other publications on the subject include In Camera: Francis Bacon - Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting (2005) and Francis Bacon: Incunabula (2008). In 2009 he edited Francis Bacon - New Studies: Centenary Essays. He co-curated the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf in 2006, and Francis Bacon / Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone, at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 2013.

Carol Jacobi is Curator of British Art at Tate Britain, and has published and broadcast widely on 19th- and 20th-century British art, most recently ‘Picasso’s portraits of Isabel Rawsthorne’ in the Burlington Magazine. She was curator of the major Tate exhibition Van Gogh and Britain.

John Maybury is an award-winning British filmmaker. In the 1980s, he was a leading light of the British underground film movement, and in 2005 he was listed as one of the 100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain.

Sophie Pretorius is the archivist of The Estate of Francis Bacon collection. She has written and published numerous essays and articles about Francis Bacon, and has transcribed all his surviving medical records. Gregory Salter is Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Birmingham, who specialises in British art after 1945, with a focus on histories of gender, sexuality, migrations and the home. He has contributed essays to Derek Boshier: Reinventor (2023), Lucien Freud: New Perspectives (2022), Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945–65 (2022) David Hockney: Moving Focus (2021), All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting From Life (2018) and authored Art and masculinity in post-war Britain: reconstructing home (2019).

Georgia Atienza is Assistant Curator, Photographs (Acquisitions and Collections), at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She has contributed to publications including Women at Work: 1900 to Now, Yevonde: Life and Colour, Love Stories: Art, Passion & Tragedy (2020), Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer (2011) and The Virginia Woolf Bulletin (Issue No. 21, January 2006).

Tanya Bentley is Curator, Contemporary, at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She has contributed to publications including Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024 (2024), Icons & Identities (2021), Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life (2018), Polyphonies (2017) and Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask (2017).