Why Portrait of Man with Glasses III marks a pivotal point in Francis Bacon’s career

It’s thought that the first pair of spectacles was made in Italy in the 13th century. They consisted of two lenses riveted together, had no sides, and typically needed to be held in place by the wearer’s hand. In the intervening centuries, the technology behind — and the design of — spectacles has evolved, but their use has remained constant.

It’s no surprise, then, that they appear in pictures across art history: from El Greco’s portrait of the bespectacled Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara, via Jean-Siméon Chardin’s depictions of himself in old age, to Grant Wood’s American Gothic (the male figure in which carries a pitchfork and wears round glasses).

No consideration of this topic is complete, though, without mention of a thrilling set of paintings by Francis Bacon. Marking a pivotal moment in the artist’s career, the series comprises four works — each depicting a man in glasses. He unveiled them publicly at a solo exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in London in July 1963.

The painting described by the curator and Bacon scholar Dennis Farr as ‘the most dramatic and disquieting of the series’ — Portrait of Man with Glasses III — is being offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale at Christie’s on 5 March 2025.

The head of a man in dark spectacles confronts us. The backdrop is dark, too, sparkling like coal dust, Bacon having mixed silver sand into his black pigment. The head is created out of swift, energetic brushstrokes, with bold whites offset by tones of reddish-pink and touches of teal.

The strokes are so energetic, it’s as if they have destabilised the man’s features and caused the glasses to slide down his face. Drama is also built in the interplay between positive and negative space, with significant flashes of raw canvas exposed to view. (In the name of elemental directness, Bacon liked to work on a canvas’s unprimed reverse.)

As notable a feature as any, though, is the man’s mouth: his teeth are revealed in a delicate impasto. Shortly before painting this work, Bacon said that he had ‘always been very moved by the movements of the mouth’. He was speaking in an interview with his friend, the art critic David Sylvester, and added: ‘I like… the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.’

For Bacon, no part of the anatomy was more important. As a young man living in Paris, he had come across an illustrated textbook on the mouth — and was mesmerised by it. He had had a similar reaction when watching Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, which featured a famous close-up shot of a wounded woman screaming (with mouth wide open) in agony and fear.

Both sources proved crucial to Bacon’s early career. Their influence can be detected in the toothy maws of the creatures in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), his stunning breakthrough work. Likewise in many of his most celebrated paintings from the subsequent decade and a half: his ‘Head’ series, for example, depicting screaming human heads, and his multiple visions of howling popes.

These works are widely seen as testament to the bleak wartime and post-war age in which they were made — with Bacon’s mouths representing dark voids of mortal solitude. According to Farr, Portrait of Man with Glasses III was created in a similar vein. ‘There is an air of menace, of dissolution,’ he wrote of the work, in the catalogue of a Bacon retrospective he co-curated in 1999 which toured the US.

His view is echoed by Richard Calvocoressi, the co-curator of a later exhibition in which the painting appeared, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, in 2005. Calvocoressi has said that the image ‘vibrates with demonic life’, thanks to the way ‘the fierce energy of Bacon’s brush-marks combines with a sense of physiognomic collapse’.

An alternative interpretation is possible, however — one that reflects the painting’s visual richness and multivalency. It is an interpretation that reflects a change of mood, if not direction, in Bacon’s art at the time of the work’s creation.

In 1962, the year before painting Portrait of Man with Glasses III, the artist had had his first museum retrospective — at the Tate in London. On the day of the show’s opening, 24 May, he learned of the death in Tangier of his ex-lover Peter Lacy, an erstwhile pilot with whom he had had a turbulent relationship. Bacon was devastated by the loss, the couple only having split up a few months earlier.

Towards the anniversary of Lacy’s death, Bacon would paint a stunning memorial to him: Landscape Near Malabata, Tangier (which sold for £19,630,000 at Christie’s in London in 2024). An image of grief, desire and longing, it is set in the Moroccan landscape where Lacy lived the last part of his life, and also was laid to rest. Two shadowy forms flit around a desert vortex beneath a dark but heated North African sky.

The picture is widely regarded as a parting salvo by Bacon to his ex-lover — and one might well see Portrait of Man with Glasses III, painted just weeks later, as signalling a fresh start, personally and professionally. There’s a new sprightliness to the artist’s colour, plus a new sense of formal freedom. As for the man’s mouth, it positively shimmers, composed of a plethora of delicate dabs.

It’s perhaps going too far to suggest that the subject is smiling, but his mouth formation does bear more than a passing resemblance to that of Bacon’s friend Henrietta Moraes in his painting of her from 1969, Study of Henrietta Moraes Laughing (which fetched $21,687,500 at Christie’s in New York in 2018).

The man’s dark, glinting glasses might also pass for shades worn at a jauntily cool angle, reflecting the cultural context in which the work was created — namely, London at the dawn of the Swinging Sixties, when Pop art was on the rise.

Over the years, various individuals have been proposed as the subject for Portrait of Man with Glasses III, from the author James Joyce to the eye surgeon and gay rights campaigner Patrick Trevor-Roper (a friend of Bacon’s). The figure, however, was most likely an amalgamation of various people, and derived from a host of different sources — the Cubist portraits of Pablo Picasso among them.

Portrait of Man with Glasses III has been shown in 18 exhibitions worldwide, which is more than the total for the other paintings in the series combined. (Two of those paintings are in private collections; the other, Portrait of Man with Glasses I, is owned by Seattle Art Museum.)

The work coming to Christie’s was seen most recently in Francis Bacon: Human Presence, an exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, which closed in January 2025. It also served as the cover image for the catalogue of Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone, a show held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 2013.

After a handful of private sales over its six-decade existence, Portrait of Man with Glasses III is now coming to auction for the first time. It’s a work that marks a fulcrum in Bacon’s practice, calling upon the dark existentialist tenor of his earlier work while at the same time looking forward to a phase of optimism and openness in the 1960s, a decade when his art was imbued with brighter colour and dominated by portraits of close friends and his partner after Lacy, George Dyer (whom he met late in 1963).

Portrait of Man with Glasses III shows Bacon on the cusp of an exciting new vision.

Led by the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale and The Art of the Surreal on 5 March 2025, Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online until 20 March. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales