Extremes structured the daily life of Francis Bacon. Hedonistic evenings in Soho passed quicker than champagne dances across the tongue, and discipline compelled him back to the canvas early each morning. His self-portrait of 1987 begins the exhibition — a spectral face splattered with crimson paint, eyes looking downwards in deathly acceptance. Ghostly memories of drunken gambling, feasting, and violent passion. Painful intensity is laid to rest. 

Francis Bacon: Human Presence (10 October 2024 – 19 January 2025) at the National Portrait Gallery is a tantalising overview of Bacon’s career through portraiture. Whereas the Royal Academy exhibition of 2022 focused on his fascination with animals, this one familiarises us with his crafting of a visual language to capture the space between human presence and memory. Its chronological structure presents how his portraiture emerged from the 1940s, to be subsequently shaped by the bohemian lives of his sitters. 

Bacon greedily immersed himself in the Old Masters. From Velázquez, emerald greens, fleshy pinks, and glowing whites, stultified with black. From van Gogh, lonely shadow figures wade through viscous ember. From Rembrandt, paint so thick that it becomes “anti-illustrational” — as seen in the original Self-Portrait with Beret (1659) displayed nearby. Bacon’s irreverent infatuation with this work is evidenced in a photographic portrait by Irving Penn (1962). Confessional, he gazes upwards, hand to his chest, whilst a reproduction of the Rembrandt overlooks from his studio wall behind.

Old Master imagery provided the foundational means to subvert conventional portraiture by developing a visceral language that could “give over all the pulsations of a person”. In a portrait of 1955, the smartly dressed businessman Robert Sainsbury sits in a deep pool of blackness, his face glowing gas-light blue. Alight, he appears as a punch in the canvas, framed by white lines. These cage-like structures subvert the traditional portrait format, apparent in his 1949 reworking of Pope Innocent X (c.1650) by Velázquez. Clerical robes indicate status, but his cool authority is pulverised by a primal scream, all the while encased in a white cage that resembles an electric chair.

Bacon was clearly fascinated by social performance. Photographic portraits of himself taken by others hang playfully in a line, nearby a documentary interview (1963) with the art critic and champion of his work, David Sylvester, and an ambitious self-portrait (1991-2), found unfinished on his easel after his death. Together they suggest his felt futility to satisfactorily capture a person through a single perspective.

Portraits of his closest friends — fellow artists, muses, and male lovers — are the final focus of the exhibition. Many of these gathered in the Colony Room, a private members club in Soho home to key figures of the post-war British art scene. The resultant portraits were so raw and introspective that Bacon seldom painted his subjects from life after 1959, preferring to work from photographs, such as those by John Deakin. Crumpled centres, curled edges, and splattered faces, these source images evidence how tightly Bacon held his sitters. Human presence was manipulated and possessed.

Photographs are curated with the corresponding portraits, providing key insight into the artistic leaps made by Bacon. The striking Henrietta Moraes — Queen of Soho and muse to other artists, including Maggi Hambling — is captured by Deakin in the late 1950s, and displayed close to a triptych from 1963. Scarlet, ruby, and wine, spilt across yellow-and-green tinged bone, born from the original black-and-white photograph.

The early 1960s is presented as a turning point for Bacon following the death of the “love of his life”, Peter Lacy (1916-62), a destructive relationship marked by complications, infidelities, and violence. Two portraits of Lacy flank a central self-portrait in the triptych (1962), evidencing the guilt-ridden grief suffered by Bacon for his lover’s alcohol-induced death. Triptychs, with forms morphing across panels, became an important means of depicting his closest friends at this time.

Although committed to figuration, Bacon’s portraits are certainly not illustrative. Portraits of Lucian Freud resemble the sitter’s face, but the body is Bacon’s own. Conflated identities evidence Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter”. Expression is pushed so that mouths bleed into noses and eyes droop away from the canvas, whilst scraped pigments and void-like patches demarcate the mimetic limits.

Multiple voices are collated for this exhibition. Quotes by Bacon are weaved throughout, despite their sometimes-clunky indigestibility. The Bloomberg Connects audio guide provides useful insights into his work from archivists, artists, curators, and sitters. One of them reflects on his relationships with Peter Lacy and John Edwards at a time when homosexuality was illegal. Surprisingly, his sadomasochistic love life is little mentioned, which is perhaps the exhibition’s freshest perspective for interpreting his work. Instead, emotive portraits honour post-war debauchery. It was at the Colony Room that Bacon would make his favourite toast: “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends”. Pain is the opposite of pleasure for Bacon in this quote, but his portraits bring them dangerously close together.

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Francis Bacon: Human Presence is at the National Portrait Gallery from 10 October 2024 – 19 January 2025