Original color lithograph on Arches paper with full margins. Hand signed by the artist in pen, "Francis Bacon" lower left, and numbered in pencil "66/200" lower right. Printed by the lithographer A. Manaranche. Published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York with their blindstamp, lower left. A very fine impression, in very good condition.

Image size: 45 3/16" x 33 7/8"; Sheet size: 61 7/8" x 41 11/16"

Francis Bacon was born in 1909 in Dublin, Ireland. His family moved tirelessly between Ireland and England while the countries were being ravaged by the violence of WWI. During his early adolescence Bacon discovered his homosexuality and was subsequently banned from the family home when his father became aware of his indiscretions. From then Francis began an independent life in London and later abroad where he was influenced by an exhibition of Picasso’s drawings in Paris in the summer of 1927. It was at this time that he first entertained the notion of becoming an artist. Bacon was already enjoying success as a furniture designer when his interest shifted to creating fine art. Although a rejection from the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 discouraged his early painting ambitions, he continued to make furniture and refine his painting style in London throughout the early 1940s.

By 1944, Bacon’s painting style developed to include the influences of Picasso’s contorted imagery, the brutality of the Nazis, and the destruction of WWII. It is from these external influences and the inner struggles of his own experience that Bacon produced the triptych painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,1944. The painting personifies the violence and pain of life through distorted, human-like creatures. The figurative and abstract style he developed from this first study continued in his later works, as with this poster for the Metropolitan Museum where Bacon again uses bold and muted colors to highlight the amorphous and twisted human figures set in an enclosed, artificial space. These unsettling and grotesque images typify Bacon’s oeuvre and contribute to his appeal as a controversial but leading figurative painter of the 20th century.