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拍品专文
Painted in 1955, Francis Bacon’s haunting evocation of the English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake is one of the artist’s most striking portraits. Bacon’s choice of subject might, at first, seem to be a departure from his immortalizations of the friends, lovers, and other acquaintances who made up his London social circle. Yet Bacon was a great admirer of the eighteenth-century Romantic’s independence of thought, and in particular his poetry. Indeed, Bacon would go on to paint several versions of this particular subject, five of which survive, two being in major museum collections. The present work is also an early example of the intimately-scaled portrait heads that would go on to become a central part of his oeuvre, either as single canvases or as part of a triptych. Widely exhibited during the artist’s lifetime, including in seminal exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in London in 1962 and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1963, Study for Portrait I (after the Life Mask of William Blake) stands as an important work, clearly demonstrating the artist’s ability to convey human emotion with the merest of means.
Illuminated in the center of a dark void, Bacon’s head of William Blake is an essay in both anatomy and painting. As in many of the artist’s most celebrated portraits and self-portraits, the most distinctive features of his subject’s appearance are rendered with a single stroke of the artist’s brush: the high forehead, the distinctive cheekbone, the prominent bridge of the nose and the taut muscle of the neck are all manifested into existence by the artist’s confident and defining brushwork. Once this anatomical framework had been established, Bacon then masterfully depicts the infinite subtleties of the human skin by combining passages of soft pinks, bloody reds, warm whites, subtle grays, and passages of raw canvas to produce a poignant evocation of Blake’s ghostly face.
The original life mask upon which Bacon based his painting was created in 1823 by James S. Deville, a noted phrenologist and mask maker who subscribed to the idea that a person’s character and behavior could be determined by the physical appearance of their skull. While Bacon himself did not subscribe to these views, he did have a deep interest in anatomy, something that can clearly be seen in early paintings such as his intense Painting 1946 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). However, as Martin Harrison points out in his Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, the intent in the present work does not appear to be to dissect his subject’s physical appearance, but instead to meld it with the artist’s own lived experience at the time. Harrison explains that Bacon had recently returned from a tumultuous vacation in Italy with Peter Lacy, an occasion that marked the beginning of the end of their relationship. Thus, in the present work Bacon exaggerates the downturned mouth in Deville’s original, a sign that, as Harrison explains “It is hard to resist the speculation that there is an element of self-portraiture in this doleful representation” (quoted in Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné Volume II 1929-57, London, 2016, p. 424).
The origins of Study for Portrait I (after the Life Mask of William Blake) can be found in Bacon’s friendship with British composer and conductor Gerhard Schurmann. The pair lived close to each other in Henley-on-Thames, a place Bacon often frequented to be close to Peter Lacy who lived nearby. During these stays Bacon and Schurmann became good friends and when Schurmann set some of Blake’s poetry to music, he asked Bacon to illustrate the album cover for the subsequent recording. Intrigued by the proposal, Bacon accompanied Schurmann to the National Portrait Gallery in London where they studied the life mask of Blake made by Deville four years before the poet’s death. During that visit, Bacon took a number of photographs, and went back for a number of subsequent visits, before embarking on the series. As Bacon’s biographer Michael Peppipatt argues, the haunting life mask turned out to be the perfect vehicle for Bacon’s spectral, painterly style. “In Bacon’s masterly versions,” he writes, “they appear to have gone over into death while leaving their presence like a phosphorescence on the canvas” (quoted in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, New York, 1996, p. 164).
William Blake was one of the most important figures in the Romantic movement in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, celebrated for his poetry, paintings, and printmaking. Initially chided by his contemporaries for his hostility to the establishment, the Church of England, and his other idiosyncratic views, Blake later came to be celebrated for his unique expressiveness and creativity, plus his philosophical approach to art, all qualities which endeared him to Bacon.
The present work is one of five surviving paintings which Bacon executed using William Blake as his subject matter. The first three were painted in 1955, while Bacon was in residence at the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames outside London. A fourth was painted either later in 1955 or, as some scholars believe, early in 1956, with a fifth being definitively painted in 1956. Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake) is in the collection of the Tate in London, and Study for Portrait IV (after the Life Mask of William Blake) (1956) is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The importance of this subject matter to the artist can be seen in the fact that Bacon was given a plaster copy of the life mask in the National Portrait Gallery, which he kept for the rest of his life alongside treasured personal photographs of his other celebrated subjects, John Edwards, Peter Lacy and George Dyer.
The present work has also been included in a number of important exhibitions, including the artist’s first retrospective at the Tate Gallery, in 1962. Bacon himself was closely involved in selecting works for the exhibition, which was popular with the public and critics alike. “The exhibition was a tremendous success,” the curator Sir John Rothenstein recalled, “attracting more praise than any exhibition by a British painter within my memory” (quoted in M. Peppiatt, op. cit., 1996, p. 192). A year later the painting traveled to the United States to be included in a retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, a museum known to be more receptive to European painting than other American museums still fixated on Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Despite the competition for attention from American artists, the critic Irving Sandler enthused that the impact of Bacon’s paintings were undeniable: “The din which Bacon makes the eye hear is shattering” (quoted in M. Stevens and A. Swan, Francis Bacon, Revelations, New York, 2021, p. 469).
A pivotal work from within Francis Bacon’s extensive oeuvre, Study for Portrait I (after the Life Mask of William Blake) remains one of his most remarkable paintings. It stands as a demonstration of the artist’s ability to convey the intricacy of the human psyche. His expressive brushwork constructs the appearance of one of England’s most unique artistic figures, yet it is one that is also imbued with an element of Bacon’s own emotional complexity. This new format of a single, intimately-scaled head, proved to be particularly influential for Bacon and formed the basis for much of the rest of his career. Bacon rarely painted people from outside of his social circle, but when he did—as in the present work—it was both a personal and artistic triumph.
Illuminated in the center of a dark void, Bacon’s head of William Blake is an essay in both anatomy and painting. As in many of the artist’s most celebrated portraits and self-portraits, the most distinctive features of his subject’s appearance are rendered with a single stroke of the artist’s brush: the high forehead, the distinctive cheekbone, the prominent bridge of the nose and the taut muscle of the neck are all manifested into existence by the artist’s confident and defining brushwork. Once this anatomical framework had been established, Bacon then masterfully depicts the infinite subtleties of the human skin by combining passages of soft pinks, bloody reds, warm whites, subtle grays, and passages of raw canvas to produce a poignant evocation of Blake’s ghostly face.
The original life mask upon which Bacon based his painting was created in 1823 by James S. Deville, a noted phrenologist and mask maker who subscribed to the idea that a person’s character and behavior could be determined by the physical appearance of their skull. While Bacon himself did not subscribe to these views, he did have a deep interest in anatomy, something that can clearly be seen in early paintings such as his intense Painting 1946 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). However, as Martin Harrison points out in his Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, the intent in the present work does not appear to be to dissect his subject’s physical appearance, but instead to meld it with the artist’s own lived experience at the time. Harrison explains that Bacon had recently returned from a tumultuous vacation in Italy with Peter Lacy, an occasion that marked the beginning of the end of their relationship. Thus, in the present work Bacon exaggerates the downturned mouth in Deville’s original, a sign that, as Harrison explains “It is hard to resist the speculation that there is an element of self-portraiture in this doleful representation” (quoted in Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné Volume II 1929-57, London, 2016, p. 424).
The origins of Study for Portrait I (after the Life Mask of William Blake) can be found in Bacon’s friendship with British composer and conductor Gerhard Schurmann. The pair lived close to each other in Henley-on-Thames, a place Bacon often frequented to be close to Peter Lacy who lived nearby. During these stays Bacon and Schurmann became good friends and when Schurmann set some of Blake’s poetry to music, he asked Bacon to illustrate the album cover for the subsequent recording. Intrigued by the proposal, Bacon accompanied Schurmann to the National Portrait Gallery in London where they studied the life mask of Blake made by Deville four years before the poet’s death. During that visit, Bacon took a number of photographs, and went back for a number of subsequent visits, before embarking on the series. As Bacon’s biographer Michael Peppipatt argues, the haunting life mask turned out to be the perfect vehicle for Bacon’s spectral, painterly style. “In Bacon’s masterly versions,” he writes, “they appear to have gone over into death while leaving their presence like a phosphorescence on the canvas” (quoted in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, New York, 1996, p. 164).
William Blake was one of the most important figures in the Romantic movement in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, celebrated for his poetry, paintings, and printmaking. Initially chided by his contemporaries for his hostility to the establishment, the Church of England, and his other idiosyncratic views, Blake later came to be celebrated for his unique expressiveness and creativity, plus his philosophical approach to art, all qualities which endeared him to Bacon.
The present work is one of five surviving paintings which Bacon executed using William Blake as his subject matter. The first three were painted in 1955, while Bacon was in residence at the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames outside London. A fourth was painted either later in 1955 or, as some scholars believe, early in 1956, with a fifth being definitively painted in 1956. Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake) is in the collection of the Tate in London, and Study for Portrait IV (after the Life Mask of William Blake) (1956) is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The importance of this subject matter to the artist can be seen in the fact that Bacon was given a plaster copy of the life mask in the National Portrait Gallery, which he kept for the rest of his life alongside treasured personal photographs of his other celebrated subjects, John Edwards, Peter Lacy and George Dyer.
The present work has also been included in a number of important exhibitions, including the artist’s first retrospective at the Tate Gallery, in 1962. Bacon himself was closely involved in selecting works for the exhibition, which was popular with the public and critics alike. “The exhibition was a tremendous success,” the curator Sir John Rothenstein recalled, “attracting more praise than any exhibition by a British painter within my memory” (quoted in M. Peppiatt, op. cit., 1996, p. 192). A year later the painting traveled to the United States to be included in a retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, a museum known to be more receptive to European painting than other American museums still fixated on Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Despite the competition for attention from American artists, the critic Irving Sandler enthused that the impact of Bacon’s paintings were undeniable: “The din which Bacon makes the eye hear is shattering” (quoted in M. Stevens and A. Swan, Francis Bacon, Revelations, New York, 2021, p. 469).
A pivotal work from within Francis Bacon’s extensive oeuvre, Study for Portrait I (after the Life Mask of William Blake) remains one of his most remarkable paintings. It stands as a demonstration of the artist’s ability to convey the intricacy of the human psyche. His expressive brushwork constructs the appearance of one of England’s most unique artistic figures, yet it is one that is also imbued with an element of Bacon’s own emotional complexity. This new format of a single, intimately-scaled head, proved to be particularly influential for Bacon and formed the basis for much of the rest of his career. Bacon rarely painted people from outside of his social circle, but when he did—as in the present work—it was both a personal and artistic triumph.
