Francis Bacon: Great Art Explained: Study after Velázquez

He is caged, dissolving into the background, imploding inside his own silent cry. When Francis Bacon emerged in postwar Britain, his work sent shock waves throughout the art world. His paintings embodied violence, distortion, and trauma. People were horrified, but they could not look away.

Bacon was a charismatic, intense, and contradictory figure who could be, in equal parts, cruel or charming. His paintings are a product of his own traumatic past, but they also tapped into something much wider—a growing unease about power, authority, and control in the aftermath of the war. A new generation was starting to ask, “Who gets to decide what is right, and who has the authority to tell us how to live?”

Bacon was openly gay at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain and could lead to life imprisonment. It meant that for much of his early life, he had to learn what to show and what to conceal. He developed a way of moving through the world without being fully seen, carefully editing what was revealed.

The shy, effeminate, asthmatic boy who grew up feeling isolated and ashamed would go on to become one of the most important painters of the 20th century, confronting head-on the darker aspects of human existence. This painting draws on one of the greatest portraits from art history and subverts it into something shocking and new. Bacon admired Diego Velázquez deeply. So why did he take something he loved and turn it into this?

Because there is no such thing in painting any longer as natural realism. It has to be reinvented because the more violently and strongly you feel about life, the more strongly you must be aware of death. Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1909 to wealthy English parents, part of a Protestant Anglo-Irish family living within a predominantly Catholic country.

It placed him, from the beginning, slightly out of step with his surroundings, part of a ruling class that was already beginning to feel historically unstable. Religion here was not just about belief, but structure—a framework of authority, judgment, sin, and punishment. Bacon would reject faith entirely.

“From my own point of view, I know we’re born and we die, and that’s it. And you do something in between if you can.” But the psychological force of these ideas would never quite leave him. They would return later in his work in screaming popes and bodies trapped in invisible cages—ideas of restriction and shame rather than comfort and worship.

His father, a former military officer turned horse breeder, embodied a strict authoritarian idea of masculinity. His mother came from a wealthy family of industrialists. His early childhood home in Ireland was an 18-bedroom country house surrounded by stables and outbuildings, housing an array of horses and dogs.

From an early age, Bacon was unwell. He suffered from severe asthma, made worse by an acute allergy to the very animals that filled the estate. In those days, the treatment for asthma involved regular morphine injections, which his father would administer. The hypodermic syringe is a motif that appears time and again in his work.

Being noticeably effeminate, he was often bullied by his father. He knew he felt different from an early age and grew up lonely and isolated. He would later describe how his father tried to “make a man of him” by having him horsewhipped by the grooms. He then seduced those same grooms, cementing his lifelong attraction to working-class masculinity and perhaps serving as a form of defiance against his father.

This difficult and complex childhood would shape a lifelong tendency to associate intimacy with pain and emotional conflict. It also taught him something else: how to divide the self. He carefully curated what could be shown and what had to remain hidden. At just 16, his father threw him out of the family home.

Bacon left rural Ireland behind, moving first to London, then onto Berlin, and then finally Paris. When Bacon arrived in Berlin in 1927, it was at the height of the Weimar era. Defined by an explosion of cultural and intellectual creativity, Berlin was a center of modernism, experimental art, and cinema.

The nightlife was renowned for its cabaret and jazz clubs that embraced sexual freedom, hedonism, and acceptance of all sexualities. It was a world apart from his isolated rural youth. “But I looked also a great deal at the cinema.” It was here that Bacon first saw Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

These films would kickstart his lifelong love of cinema and, as we shall see, would play an important role in his paintings as he drew on the ideas of distortion, montage, and emotional intensity. “I can’t say how they’ve directly affected me, but they certainly have affected my whole attitude to visual things.” After two months in Berlin, Bacon traveled to Paris, where he stayed for around a year and a half.

The impact of Paris was decisive. It was here that he saw the work of Pablo Picasso for the first time. The experience was transformative. “Picasso,” he later said, “helped me to see.” For an untrained artist unsure how to begin, Picasso demonstrated that painting did not need to follow inherited rules; it could invent its own logic.

Bacon would decide in that very moment to become a painter. While in Paris, he also saw the premiere of Abel Gance’s Napoleon. Its pioneering three-screen projection left a lasting impression, and Bacon would later cite it as an influence on his first major work rather than the religious triptych format it is often assumed to echo.

At the same time, he was looking closely at older painting. One of the works that struck him most deeply was Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents. The image of the screaming mother in its center, which Bacon described as “probably the best human cry ever painted,” would become a lasting source for his fixation on the open mouth and the expression of human agony.

“And I’ve always hoped, in a sense, to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.” After his time in Paris, Bacon returned to London, where he began working as an interior designer. His work was modern, stylish, and commercially successful, with perhaps even an occasional nod to his hero. But after a few years, he abandoned the profession to focus on painting.

Designers were often looked down upon within the art world, where the label “decorative” carried a certain stigma. Bacon rarely spoke about this period of his life, perhaps because it did not align with the image he was beginning to construct. Despite hiding his career as an interior designer, art historians have traced connections between this early interior work and his subsequent painting.

Not least in his use of the space frame—an architectural framing device he would become known for—as well as the chrome tubular frames used in his furniture design that we also find present in many of his paintings. By the early 1930s, he had begun to paint seriously. His first work to attract public attention in 1933 already showed traces of Picasso’s influence.

Though Bacon later destroyed most of his early material, dismissing it as too derivative. This frustration contributed to a period of withdrawal from painting between 1937 and 1943. When he returned, it was with a new intensity. The breakthrough came in 1944 with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a work that still carries echoes of the biomorphic forms he had first encountered in Picasso’s work back in Paris in 1927.

“And I always remember one of the usual critics to me said, ‘Why bother to do things like that when it’s already been done by Picasso?'” Looking back, those formative years in Berlin and Paris had given Bacon his visual language. From cinema came the cropping, distortion, and sense of movement. From Picasso, the permission to reinvent form. From Poussin, the raw expression of human anguish.

As he developed, he would also turn increasingly to photography and film stills as working tools, testing, repeating, and distorting poses before translating them into paint as if each canvas were a frame pulled from an unseen film. “Whatever way you like to put it, because I do, in fact, find photographs much less inhibiting than having the subject sitting there before me.”

Early on, Bacon was very wary about revealing his methods and inspiration, perhaps because he didn’t go to art school and lacked any formal training. He didn’t like to discuss his extensive use of photographic images and instead promoted the idea that the distorted portraits and deformed nudes he painted came about by chance or accident.

In the 1940s, this was more than just artistic mythmaking. Working directly from photographs was not widely accepted as a serious painterly practice. Painting was still expected to be rooted in observation, memory, or imagination. Photography was seen as mechanical, even suspect. To admit reliance on it risked undermining the idea of the painter as an original creator.

After his death in 1992, the reality became impossible to ignore. Thousands of photographic images littered across the floor, ankle-deep, were discovered in his chaotic studio—a space so disorderly it felt less like a workplace and more like a physical extension of his mind. “I feel at home here in this chaos, because also, chaos suggests images to me.”

In those piles lay the visual archive that fed his paintings, revealing far more about his process than he ever admitted. We can see a pattern emerging where he would often conceal things that didn’t fit his agenda in his methods, his influences, and even aspects of his identity. Using photographs wasn’t new.

Artists like Degas had used photography decades before as inspiration for composing and formulating paintings. And as we saw in my video on Egon Schiele, artists had used found images—in Schiele’s case, from medical journals—as inspiration for paintings as well. Bacon didn’t simply replicate photographs. He cut out and cropped images, folding, tearing, and distorting his sources and really making them his own.

Ideas were extracted, altered, and inserted into larger compositions. And we should look to this source material as equivalent to traditional artist preliminary drawings or sketches. More often than not, the photos he left in huge, messy piles on his studio floor were just naturally distorted by careless handling, paint spills, scratches, and rips, and they would ultimately disintegrate.

A good example is this photo, originally taken by John Deakin, of Bacon’s partner George Dyer, which had disintegrated to this point, found in Bacon’s studio after his death. And Bacon used that fragment as a source for the central panel in a triptych of Dyer. The thousands of photographic images that were found in his studio included pages from medical publications, which, as we see here, he used as a direct source.

“Many years ago, I happened to find a book in Paris on diseases of the mouth, and the colors were so beautiful that that interested me. And I think that’s very often the way, the reason I did the scream.” Also, boxing magazines, the Physique Pictorial beefcake magazine, newspaper clippings, film stills, and images of dictators.

He also had copies of Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photographs of humans and animals in motion and often referenced these. Using multiple sources and recombining them into something new would become common decades later with postmodernism. But in the 1940s, this way of working with photography was unusual, and the resulting images were deeply unsettling.

In 1939, Europe was plunged into war. Six years of conflict followed with millions of deaths. Bacon was declared unfit for service due to his chronic asthma but volunteered as a member of the Civil Defence, recovering dead and dismembered bodies from bombed-out areas of London. It is hard not to connect this with the work he would show just a few years later.

The dust often triggered violent asthma attacks, and breathing was rarely easy for him, which raises a question about the open mouths in his paintings: Are they always screaming, or could they be suffocating, gasping for air as he so often was? During the war, his studio at 7 Cromwell Place doubled as an illegal gambling den.

And by now he was an alcoholic and compulsive gambler, drawn to risk, living between respectability and excess. His breakthrough came at the end of the war through the artist Graham Sutherland. Bacon was offered a place in a 1944 group exhibition. The work he showed caused a sensation, and he was hailed as an overnight success.

In reality, he had been working as an artist for well over a decade. But after years of failure, Bacon took this opportunity to define precisely how he wanted to be seen. By destroying most of his early paintings and downplaying those years, he carefully shaped the image he wanted the world to see: a fully formed artist triumphantly bursting onto the art scene in 1944.

With violent, ambiguous images, figures without identity, bodies under pressure, and silent cries, he had finally found his language. And from this, the Pope paintings would emerge. Diego Velázquez was one of the most influential painters of all time and a favorite of Bacon’s. His portrait of Pope Innocent X is widely considered one of the greatest ever made.

Its brushwork perfectly captured the piercing gaze of a shrewd, unflinching man. When it was finished, the Pope is said to have exclaimed, “Troppo vero!”—it’s too true. Its truth, which disturbed the Pope, lies not just in its likeness but in what it represents: the Pope as the ultimate symbol of religious and political power.

When Bacon referenced this image, he paid homage to its brilliance but also dismantled that authority, stripping it of its certainty and control. Bacon’s Study after Velázquez was one of a large series in which the artist returned obsessively to the image of the Pope. Around 45 works in total reference Velázquez’s original.

Bacon’s first Pope painting appeared just two years after his 1944 breakthrough. Though untitled, it later became known as Landscape with Pope/Dictator, establishing a theme he would revisit for decades. It may also reflect the figure of Pope Pius XII, whose silence during the Holocaust cast a long shadow over the church.

The first major work is Head VI. Here, the Pope no longer commands. He sits enclosed within cage-like lines—Bacon’s space frames—across the series. The pattern repeats. The Pope, once the embodiment of absolute power, is trapped and vulnerable. The open mouth, frozen somewhere between a scream and a silence, becomes a recurring motif.

In the aftermath of the war, power itself had come under suspicion. Figures who once seemed untouchable were now seen as fragile, even absurd. But for Bacon, the Pope was never just a symbol of institutional power. He was also something more personal. Raised under a domineering and often hostile father, Bacon grew up in the shadow of an authority he both feared and resisted.

In this sense, the Pope becomes the ultimate father figure—not just the head of the church, but a projection of absolute patriarchal control. And in Bacon’s hands, that figure is systematically dismantled. Bacon’s Popes are no longer individuals. They are images of authority under pressure, unable to hold their form.

What we are witnessing is not simply a critique of power in a post-World War world, but something closer to an act of psychological exposure: the unmaking of the father. “My life is a reflection of my work, and my work is a reflection of my life.” When Bacon painted this work, he had never seen Velázquez’s original in real life.

He knew it only through a black-and-white photograph. Even when he traveled to Rome in 1954, he chose not to see it. “When you were in Rome, you went to see the Velázquez, the Innocent?” “No, I didn’t.” “You never went?” “No.” This wasn’t just practical. It was deliberate.

To see the original would have meant facing its power directly. Instead, Bacon kept it at a distance, flattened, mediated, and already transformed through reproduction. What he worked from was not the painting itself, but an image of it—a copy of a copy. And what he creates is not a variation, but a deconstruction.

The reds of the robes become deep purple, dissolving into darkness. The pose remains, but everything else has shifted. All dignity is stripped away. The Pope grips his throne as if he is holding on for dear life. While the golden framework around him no longer supports, it confines. It reads less like a throne and more like a cage, even an electric chair.

These structures do not simply contain the figure; they redefine him. The Pope is not trapped in a room, but within a system. Power itself has become a prison. The space around him begins to collapse. Vertical lines cut through the image, flattening it, disrupting depth, confusing foreground and background.

In this painting, Bacon’s interest in cinema becomes crucial. The face of the Pope draws directly on a film still from Battleship Potemkin. The metal-rimmed glasses and the screaming mouth of the nurse on the Odessa steps are transferred onto the Pope. He also drew from found images of dictators.

Everything leads back to the mouth. “I don’t know if this obsession when I was much younger with the mouth has a lot of sexual implications, as people say it may have.” In Bacon’s work, the open mouth becomes a fixation—not quite a scream, not quite a gasp, but something suspended between the two.

A moment when the body seems to struggle simply to exist. The artist often described his work as instinctive, even accidental. But the painting suggests something else. The distortions are not random. They are controlled, repeated, refined. What appears spontaneous is often the result of careful decisions.

Like his paintings, Bacon never offers a single, stable version of the truth. He sometimes said in interviews that he did use preparatory sketches. “Do you make any use of preliminary studies or sketches of any sort?” “Yes, I do.” But in other interviews, he denied this. “Do you do drawings beforehand?” “No.”

“You go straight onto the canvas?” “Yes.” “With the paint?” “Yes.” He was a master at blurring the lines between accident and control, spontaneity and intention. This wasn’t carelessness. It was deliberate. “So the images that I’m making, that the things I’m putting down on the canvas, dictates the thing to me and it gradually builds up and comes along.”

By keeping his process unclear, he protected the sense of immediacy and rawness in his work. If the paintings felt too explained, too rational, something essential might be lost. Mystery became part of the experience. “And then suddenly, out of this chaos, comes the possibility of making an image I hadn’t thought of before.”

And it mirrors what we see here: a figure of absolute authority, fragmented. Because in the end, this is not just a portrait of a Pope. It is a portrait of power breaking down, made at a time when postwar Britain was beginning to question its institutions, its leaders, and even its place in the world.

As the old structures of authority no longer felt secure, Bacon found a strange beauty in the grotesque. He understood the violence of the world and the fragility of the body. “The thing is, what horror, what could I make to compete with what goes on every single day?” His Pope paintings are shocking because they seem to mock the unmockable, but they also reflect a wider shift—one that questions institutions and figures that claim moral authority.

A man who despised his own father had created a masterpiece: a fractured portrait of the ultimate patriarch. “So you’re resisting telling a story. I mean, that is not telling a story.” “Very, very much so. I don’t want to tell a story. I have no story to tell.” One of the best and most challenging things about Bacon’s paintings is that they don’t unfold their meaning over time in the way a film or a piece of writing does.

They don’t move from beginning to end. And without the confines of linear narrative, multiple meanings can coexist. Bacon’s Pope can be screaming or gasping for air. The painting can be a homage to a 400-year-old portrait as well as a fragment of modern cinema. It can reveal a deep distrust of authority and the impulse to tear it down.

Or it can be something more personal, a response to violence, shame, or rejection. “I couldn’t tell you. I have to ask Freud.” As we all try to exist in a world of multiple, often conflicting truths, we find ourselves returning to the same questions of alienation, identity, truth, and reality. Perhaps that is why Francis Bacon still speaks to us today.

“How can I go on now? What more have I got to say?” Us. “Right. James, we ready?” “Yeah. Let’s go.” Viewers of this channel have asked me for years about doing a podcast, and finally, here it is. Leslie Primo and I take on art as it really is. What you’re looking at, how it works, who decides what matters, and why it was made.

Big ideas made clear and entertaining. This is a podcast about class, about artists from working-class backgrounds or connected with working-class backgrounds, because great art isn’t obscure. It’s just often badly explained. I want people to be able to be in front of a painting and say that they absolutely hate it and they’re going to tell me why.

And this is a podcast about seeing clearly. Today we are here to talk about J.M.W. Turner, David Hockney, American artist Faith Ringgold, Michelangelo, and Lawrence Stephen Lowry. Available at all the usual places as well as on the YouTube channel Primo and Paint. All links in the description below. Thank you.