Francis Bacon

Arguably one of the greatest artists in British history: the formidable Francis Bacon. The Irish-born figurative painter is famous for his raw, unsettling, and visceral art. His paintings, which were mainly figurative, including crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits and portraits of close friends, executed in his wildly unique and contemporary style. 

Bacon sealed his fame with this unique ability to depict the bleakness, fear and sadness of the human condition.

Bacon was a maverick who rejected the preferred abstracted style of the era, in favour of a distinctive and disturbing realism, and is now recognised as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century.