An Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, graphic and emotionally raw imagery.

He began painting during his early 20s and worked only sporadically until his mid-30s. Before this time he drifted, earning his living as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, and it was this work and his heads and figures of the late 1940s through to the mid-1950s that sealed his reputation as a notably bleak chronicler of the human condition. From the mid-1960s, Bacon mainly produced portrait heads of friends.