Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror

Here we meet George Dyer, the man who shared much of Francis Bacon's life and became one of his most painted subjects. The two met in the early 1960s, and their relationship was both passionate and turbulent. In this 1968 work, Dyer sits on a simple wooden chair atop a round, raised platform, his face twisted and smeared as if caught in motion. To his left, an oval mirror reflects a version of his features, though the reflection refuses to match what we see in the body. Bacon loved this trick of distortion, pulling faces apart and rebuilding them in ways that feel raw and unsettling.

Bacon worked in a style all his own, though you can sense echoes of Surrealism and Expressionism in his warped figures and isolated spaces. He often placed his subjects on bare stages or inside invisible cages, stripping away any background to leave the person utterly alone. The pale, empty room here does exactly that, turning the platform into a kind of spotlight. There is a sad weight to this painting too, since Dyer struggled with drink and died a few years later, an event that haunted Bacon for the rest of his life. What stays with you is not beauty in the usual sense, but the honest, almost painful intensity of how Bacon saw the people closest to him.