.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A vision in jewel-like colour and vital, dynamic form, Portrait of Man with Glasses III (1963) is a masterwork from a pivotal moment in Francis Bacon’s career. Part of a key early group of his iconic 14 x 12” portraits, it displays the new flowering of formal freedom that defined his works of 1963. Swift, energetic brushstrokes coalesce to form the head of a man in dark spectacles, revealing flashes of raw canvas beneath. Stark whites are blushed with tones of pink and teal, pressed into the wet paint with textured fabric. Drama builds in the interplay between positive and negative space. The man’s glasses are dark, slanted voids: the black backdrop, with silver sand mixed into the pigment, sparkles like coaldust. Perhaps most arresting is the figure’s mouth. With a delicate impasto of bared teeth and sensual, diaphanous colour, its startling beauty might be said to realise Bacon’s ambition—stated in 1962—‘to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset’ (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, rev. ed., London 2016, p. 57).
Bacon created four ‘Man with Glasses’ paintings in 1963, debuting them at Marlborough Gallery in London that summer. Martin Harrison, author of Bacon’s catalogue raisonné, describes them as ‘among the most potent, if disquieting, of his portrait busts’ (M. Harrison, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume III, London 2016, p. 724). While Portrait of Man with Glasses I resides in the Seattle Art Museum, none has received as much critical attention as Portrait of Man with Glasses III, which curator Dennis Farr singled out as ‘the most dramatic and disquieting of the series’ (D. Farr, ‘Catalogue of the Works’, in Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 1999, p. 130). The work has been included in a suite of major Bacon exhibitions during the past three decades, appearing in seventeen cities across the world. Notably, it served as the catalogue cover for Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone, which opened at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2013: most recently it was seen in London, as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s acclaimed 2024-2025 retrospective Francis Bacon: Human Presence.
1963 was a watershed year for Bacon. He had held his first museum retrospective at the Tate in London the previous year. On the day of its opening, he learned that his lover, Peter Lacy, had passed away in Tangier. Their turbulent relationship, seared into so much of Bacon’s work since the early 1950s, had ended in 1961, and the artist was left haunted by his loss. Towards the anniversary of his death, Bacon painted a memorial to Lacy: Landscape Near Malabata, Tangier (1963), an extraordinary image of grief, desire and longing in which shadows flit round a desert vortex beneath a dark, heated sky. One of Bacon’s most important paintings, this work’s whirling, elliptical forms foreshadow the distinctive torsion seen in Portrait of Man with Glasses III, which was made within weeks of Landscape Near Malabata, Tangier.
In the wake of his triumph and tragedy, Bacon was beginning to explore new colours, techniques and subjects. The dark, existentialist tenor of the previous decade gave way to a mood of openness and vigour that suffuses the works of 1963. The ‘Man with Glasses’ series was where the 14 x 12” head—‘the scene of some of Bacon’s most ferocious investigations’—‘really got under way’, writes John Russell (J. Russell, Francis Bacon, rev. ed., London 2010, pp. 99, 123). Embracing this concentrated format, which he had first experimented with in 1961, Bacon created seminal triptych portraits of his friend Henrietta Moraes, and—following their meeting in autumn 1963—his new partner George Dyer, who would soon become one of his principal sitters. The year concluded with the October opening of Bacon’s first major American exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
The mouth in Portrait of Man with Glasses III represents the climax of a theme that had fascinated Bacon for decades. As a young man in 1920s Paris, he had become mesmerised by a ‘second-hand book which had beautiful hand-coloured plates … of the mouth open and of the examination of the inside of the mouth’: around the same time, he saw Sergei Eisenstein’s 1922 film Battleship Potemkin, in which a famous close-up shot captures the open-mouthed scream of an injured woman. ‘I did hope one day’, he said, ‘to make the best painting of the human cry’ (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, ibid., p. 40). These images, fused in Bacon’s fascination, would resound through his early paintings. They are there in the toothy maws of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944, Tate, London), and in his crucial first ‘Heads’, howling Popes and animal studies of the 1940s and 1950s.
In a Europe ravaged by conflict, Bacon’s post-war work was conversant with the era’s darkness. Drawing on existential philosophy and literature, his early mouths were voids of mortal loneliness, sounding the animal cries of trapped and tormented beings. By the time of the present work—painted amid the rise of Swinging London, Pop Art and Bacon’s own buoyant critical success—his motifs had become freer and more multivalent. Portrait of Man with Glasses III realises his ambition to match Monet in capturing ‘the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth’, alive with movement and subtle light. At the same time Bacon was deepening his interest in Pablo Picasso, who, he said, had suggested a whole area ‘which in a way has been unexplored, of organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it’ (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, ibid., pp. 40, 9). In Portrait of Man with Glasses III the face itself twists like a chrysalis, as if physically enacting a metamorphosis in Bacon’s art.
Picasso’s Primitivist and Cubist reworkings of the human head—the features distorted and rearranged, and seen from multiple angles at once—were foundational for Bacon. Portrait of Man with Glasses III bears fractured echoes of Picasso’s ‘Weeping Women’, and David Sylvester noted a similarity with two wartime portraits made in 1939. The man’s glasses slip, glinting, down a warped face with the mouth swept round to one side. His hairline, skull and shoulders morph into liquid silhouettes, adorned with the vortical shape of an ear. While indebted to Picasso’s faces, however, Portrait of Man with Glasses III has none of their mask-like fixity. The subject instead seems—paradoxically—caught in the act of refusing to be pinned down. Where Picasso’s heads might happily be reproduced as sculptures, writes Russell, ‘… Bacon’s heads by contrast are pure painting and could not be transposed into any other medium: the thing said and the way of saying it interlock completely’ (J. Russell, ibid., p. 123).
This fusion of medium and message was central to Bacon’s outlook. He strove constantly to combine what he referred to as ‘fact’, or recognisable, figurative reality, with the radical artistic risk of his painterly technique. ‘It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system’, he said, ‘and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain’ (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, ibid., p. 18). To achieve this elemental directness, Bacon painted the present work on the reverse of the canvas, as he had done since the 1940s. The tooth of the unprimed surface enabled dry paint to be dragged into broken, lucent strokes. The black background’s profound darkness, impregnated with sand, contrasts vividly with the fabric striations—Bacon commonly used a scrap of corduroy, or a cashmere jumper—which touch the paint, like skin, with a final delicate caress.
Engaged with diverse modes of image-making, Bacon drew upon photographs from a wide range of genres, including film stills, reproductions of paintings and sculptures, contemporary newsprint, Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century motion studies, and portraits of his Soho circle taken by the photographer John Deakin. Among his early inspirations was the 1939 book Positioning in Radiography by T. C. Clark, whose early X-ray images unveiled—as T. S. Eliot had written— ‘the skull beneath the skin’ (T. S. Eliot, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, Poems, New York 1920, p. 31). The way in which the X-ray showed the teeth, quoted in Portrait of Man with Glasses III, appears to have been a source of special attraction for Bacon. The man’s light-ringed black lenses also recall the diagrammatic, circular photographs seen in the book. Further abstracted, these dark discs would appear increasingly in Bacon’s introspective self-portraits of the mid-1970s, punching ocular holes in the artist’s own image.
Indeed, while the ‘Men with Glasses’ depict no known sitter—suggestions have included the ophthalmologist Patrick Trevor-Roper, and the author James Joyce—all of Bacon’s works contain an aspect of self-portraiture. Bacon saw himself as part of a lineage of painters who had truly put themselves into their work, including Vincent van Gogh, Diego Velázquez and his own contemporary Lucian Freud. Greatest of all, he believed, was Rembrandt. The Dutch master’s Self-Portrait with Beret (circa 1659), Bacon enthused, was ‘almost completely anti-illustrational … there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image.’ He saw these mysterious, impulsive marks as more powerful than anything achieved in abstract art, because they were allied with the recording of visual ‘fact’: a tension held together by Rembrandt’s ‘profound sensibility’ (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, ibid., p. 67). In the free brushwork of Portrait of Man with Glasses III, we see Bacon’s own sensibility come to the fore.
Painting, Bacon said, ‘is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected on canvas’ (F. Bacon quoted in ‘Art: Survivors’, Time, Vol. 54, No. 21, 21 November 1949, p. 44). Portrait of Man with Glasses III offers this insight in more ways than one. Situated at a fulcrum in his practice, it calls upon the most dark, visceral achievements of Bacon’s early paintings while also looking forward to a phase of optimism and exploration: to his portraits of his friends, himself and George Dyer that would define the work of the coming decade, and to a fresh unfurling of daring form and colour. At its centre is the mouth, which—no longer the rictus of the skull—becomes a thing of mobile, shimmering splendour. The mouth, for Bacon, was also a site of sensuality, laughter and conversation. Here, he speaks with all the eloquence of a new painterly language.
Bacon created four ‘Man with Glasses’ paintings in 1963, debuting them at Marlborough Gallery in London that summer. Martin Harrison, author of Bacon’s catalogue raisonné, describes them as ‘among the most potent, if disquieting, of his portrait busts’ (M. Harrison, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume III, London 2016, p. 724). While Portrait of Man with Glasses I resides in the Seattle Art Museum, none has received as much critical attention as Portrait of Man with Glasses III, which curator Dennis Farr singled out as ‘the most dramatic and disquieting of the series’ (D. Farr, ‘Catalogue of the Works’, in Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 1999, p. 130). The work has been included in a suite of major Bacon exhibitions during the past three decades, appearing in seventeen cities across the world. Notably, it served as the catalogue cover for Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone, which opened at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2013: most recently it was seen in London, as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s acclaimed 2024-2025 retrospective Francis Bacon: Human Presence.
1963 was a watershed year for Bacon. He had held his first museum retrospective at the Tate in London the previous year. On the day of its opening, he learned that his lover, Peter Lacy, had passed away in Tangier. Their turbulent relationship, seared into so much of Bacon’s work since the early 1950s, had ended in 1961, and the artist was left haunted by his loss. Towards the anniversary of his death, Bacon painted a memorial to Lacy: Landscape Near Malabata, Tangier (1963), an extraordinary image of grief, desire and longing in which shadows flit round a desert vortex beneath a dark, heated sky. One of Bacon’s most important paintings, this work’s whirling, elliptical forms foreshadow the distinctive torsion seen in Portrait of Man with Glasses III, which was made within weeks of Landscape Near Malabata, Tangier.
In the wake of his triumph and tragedy, Bacon was beginning to explore new colours, techniques and subjects. The dark, existentialist tenor of the previous decade gave way to a mood of openness and vigour that suffuses the works of 1963. The ‘Man with Glasses’ series was where the 14 x 12” head—‘the scene of some of Bacon’s most ferocious investigations’—‘really got under way’, writes John Russell (J. Russell, Francis Bacon, rev. ed., London 2010, pp. 99, 123). Embracing this concentrated format, which he had first experimented with in 1961, Bacon created seminal triptych portraits of his friend Henrietta Moraes, and—following their meeting in autumn 1963—his new partner George Dyer, who would soon become one of his principal sitters. The year concluded with the October opening of Bacon’s first major American exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
The mouth in Portrait of Man with Glasses III represents the climax of a theme that had fascinated Bacon for decades. As a young man in 1920s Paris, he had become mesmerised by a ‘second-hand book which had beautiful hand-coloured plates … of the mouth open and of the examination of the inside of the mouth’: around the same time, he saw Sergei Eisenstein’s 1922 film Battleship Potemkin, in which a famous close-up shot captures the open-mouthed scream of an injured woman. ‘I did hope one day’, he said, ‘to make the best painting of the human cry’ (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, ibid., p. 40). These images, fused in Bacon’s fascination, would resound through his early paintings. They are there in the toothy maws of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944, Tate, London), and in his crucial first ‘Heads’, howling Popes and animal studies of the 1940s and 1950s.
In a Europe ravaged by conflict, Bacon’s post-war work was conversant with the era’s darkness. Drawing on existential philosophy and literature, his early mouths were voids of mortal loneliness, sounding the animal cries of trapped and tormented beings. By the time of the present work—painted amid the rise of Swinging London, Pop Art and Bacon’s own buoyant critical success—his motifs had become freer and more multivalent. Portrait of Man with Glasses III realises his ambition to match Monet in capturing ‘the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth’, alive with movement and subtle light. At the same time Bacon was deepening his interest in Pablo Picasso, who, he said, had suggested a whole area ‘which in a way has been unexplored, of organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it’ (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, ibid., pp. 40, 9). In Portrait of Man with Glasses III the face itself twists like a chrysalis, as if physically enacting a metamorphosis in Bacon’s art.
Picasso’s Primitivist and Cubist reworkings of the human head—the features distorted and rearranged, and seen from multiple angles at once—were foundational for Bacon. Portrait of Man with Glasses III bears fractured echoes of Picasso’s ‘Weeping Women’, and David Sylvester noted a similarity with two wartime portraits made in 1939. The man’s glasses slip, glinting, down a warped face with the mouth swept round to one side. His hairline, skull and shoulders morph into liquid silhouettes, adorned with the vortical shape of an ear. While indebted to Picasso’s faces, however, Portrait of Man with Glasses III has none of their mask-like fixity. The subject instead seems—paradoxically—caught in the act of refusing to be pinned down. Where Picasso’s heads might happily be reproduced as sculptures, writes Russell, ‘… Bacon’s heads by contrast are pure painting and could not be transposed into any other medium: the thing said and the way of saying it interlock completely’ (J. Russell, ibid., p. 123).
This fusion of medium and message was central to Bacon’s outlook. He strove constantly to combine what he referred to as ‘fact’, or recognisable, figurative reality, with the radical artistic risk of his painterly technique. ‘It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system’, he said, ‘and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain’ (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, ibid., p. 18). To achieve this elemental directness, Bacon painted the present work on the reverse of the canvas, as he had done since the 1940s. The tooth of the unprimed surface enabled dry paint to be dragged into broken, lucent strokes. The black background’s profound darkness, impregnated with sand, contrasts vividly with the fabric striations—Bacon commonly used a scrap of corduroy, or a cashmere jumper—which touch the paint, like skin, with a final delicate caress.
Engaged with diverse modes of image-making, Bacon drew upon photographs from a wide range of genres, including film stills, reproductions of paintings and sculptures, contemporary newsprint, Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century motion studies, and portraits of his Soho circle taken by the photographer John Deakin. Among his early inspirations was the 1939 book Positioning in Radiography by T. C. Clark, whose early X-ray images unveiled—as T. S. Eliot had written— ‘the skull beneath the skin’ (T. S. Eliot, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, Poems, New York 1920, p. 31). The way in which the X-ray showed the teeth, quoted in Portrait of Man with Glasses III, appears to have been a source of special attraction for Bacon. The man’s light-ringed black lenses also recall the diagrammatic, circular photographs seen in the book. Further abstracted, these dark discs would appear increasingly in Bacon’s introspective self-portraits of the mid-1970s, punching ocular holes in the artist’s own image.
Indeed, while the ‘Men with Glasses’ depict no known sitter—suggestions have included the ophthalmologist Patrick Trevor-Roper, and the author James Joyce—all of Bacon’s works contain an aspect of self-portraiture. Bacon saw himself as part of a lineage of painters who had truly put themselves into their work, including Vincent van Gogh, Diego Velázquez and his own contemporary Lucian Freud. Greatest of all, he believed, was Rembrandt. The Dutch master’s Self-Portrait with Beret (circa 1659), Bacon enthused, was ‘almost completely anti-illustrational … there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image.’ He saw these mysterious, impulsive marks as more powerful than anything achieved in abstract art, because they were allied with the recording of visual ‘fact’: a tension held together by Rembrandt’s ‘profound sensibility’ (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, ibid., p. 67). In the free brushwork of Portrait of Man with Glasses III, we see Bacon’s own sensibility come to the fore.
Painting, Bacon said, ‘is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected on canvas’ (F. Bacon quoted in ‘Art: Survivors’, Time, Vol. 54, No. 21, 21 November 1949, p. 44). Portrait of Man with Glasses III offers this insight in more ways than one. Situated at a fulcrum in his practice, it calls upon the most dark, visceral achievements of Bacon’s early paintings while also looking forward to a phase of optimism and exploration: to his portraits of his friends, himself and George Dyer that would define the work of the coming decade, and to a fresh unfurling of daring form and colour. At its centre is the mouth, which—no longer the rictus of the skull—becomes a thing of mobile, shimmering splendour. The mouth, for Bacon, was also a site of sensuality, laughter and conversation. Here, he speaks with all the eloquence of a new painterly language.