The artist Lucien Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, was the subject of Bacon's first identified portrait painted in 1951. A close friend of Bacon, Freud remained one of his most frequently painted portrait subjects during the following decades.

Study for Portrait of Lucien Freud was first exhibited in 1964 at the Marlborough Gallery as the left panel of a triptych. The panels were sold separately at that time, with the artist's approval, and the right panel is now in the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. As in his other major triptychs of the 1960's, Bacon employed the triptych format here to explore a variety of spatial treatments for his subject. This panel is the most complex of the three, with Freud placed in a twisting and reclining position in the corner of a bench. The top edge of this bench emphasizes the intensity of the face, while the bench's planar quality increases the dynamic effect of his twisted torso.

Bacon's goal in portraiture was never simple physical likeness nor glamorous idealization of his subjects. Instead, he worked from memory and from photographic images of his friends to create universal images with a profound and poignant content. As the artist explained,
"...if I have the presence of the image there, I am not able to drift so freely as I am able to through the photographic image...What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance... And I think that the methods by which this is done are so artificial that the model before you, in my case, inhibits the artificiality by which this thing can be brought back." (D. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1975, pp. 38, 40)