Study For a Portrait of John Edwards 1986

Year1986

Hand SignedLower Right in Pencil 

Condition Excellent 

Framed with PlexiglassBlack Box Frame 

Purchased fromAuction House 2021 

Story / Additional InfoTitle: Study for a portrait of John Edwards. Etude pour un portrait de John Edwards. Medium: Original Lithograph in colours, 1986, on Arches paper, with full margins, signed by the artist in pencil. There were also 30 Hors Commerce proofs and 5 dedicated proofs made. The plate is destroyed. Literature: Francis Bacon: Estampes - collection Alexandre Tacou Number 23. Bruno Sabatier, Francis Bacon: The Graphic Work, no. 22. Note: Although the subject of this composition was John Edwards, Bacon's great friend for the later years of his life and the inheritor of his estate, it is nonetheless, like all Bacon's work, non specific. Bacon met Edwards whist he was working as a Barman in “The Swan”, one of three Pubs run by his elder brothers. He was asked to provide Champagne for Bacon - who never turned up. Later he met Bacon and abused him for this act of unkindness. 

Certificate of AuthenticityArt Brokerage 

LID150153

Francis Bacon - Ireland

Art Brokerage: Francis Bacon Irish Artist. b. 1909-1992. Bacon was an Irish artist and one of the most unique, engaging figurative painters to emerge during the post-war period. His grotesque imagery—contorted limbs, howling mouths agape, blood—served as method of exploring nihilism and death at a time when Europe had been repeatedly savaged by war. Inspired by both the Old Masters and Surrealism, Bacon produced several compositions based on the work of other painters, notably including his arresting Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953). In this iconic work, Bacon transforms Diego Velazquez’s classic portrait into a screaming, terrifying figure. “I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs,” he once said. “The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.” Born on October 28, 1909 in Dublin, Ireland, the self-taught artist moved to London to escape a hostile home life. Bacon became part of the local art scene in the British capital, which included his friends Lucian Freud, Isabel Lambert, and John Deakin. After the death of Bacon’s lover in 1972, his work became even more personalized, with a renewed focus on mortality. In 1963, a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York brought international prestige, which continued until his death on April 28, 1992 in Madrid, Spain. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hugh Lane in Dublin, and the Albertina in Vienna, among others. Listings wanted.