There are few revelations in modern art quite as thrilling as uncovering the identity of a subject long shrouded in secrecy. That’s precisely what happened this spring, when The Observer (“Isn’t that you, Ted?”) confirmed the identity of the man in Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait, painted in 1969. After more than fifty years of speculation, the sitter - Ted Westfallen, later known as Edward “Ted” Onsloe - has emerged from the shadows, revealing a story that’s part detective tale, part social history, and entirely resonant with Bacon’s own mythic life.
The story began last autumn when Nicky Onsloe, Ted’s son, spotted a poster for the National Portrait Gallery’s Francis Bacon: Human Presence exhibition. Instantly, he recognised the man in the painting as his father, once a prominent bouncer in Soho and a friend of Bacon’s. From that spark, art historian Martin Harrison - Bacon’s official catalogue raisonné author and detective - renewed a decades-old search that had previously met dead ends. Astonishingly, Ted was alive, living near Thurrock, Essex, and ready to share the dramatic truth behind a fifty-year-old canvas
Ted was not a professional sitter, model, or artist’s assistant. He was a hundredweight champion, former meat‑market porter, and enforcer at a Soho gambling club. In 1969, he reportedly intervened to protect Bacon - who had been targeted outside the club - chasing off attackers with a truncheon. That act of spontaneous heroism drew them together. Bacon offered gratitude in the only way he knew: he used Ted’s photo-booth snapshots - images the bouncer had passed along - to create Study for Portrait.
What makes this uncovering so compelling is how deeply it echoes Bacon’s own fascination with spontaneous encounters and raw, lived experience. The artist claimed he only painted people he felt he could “see inside.” Ted’s banter, wit, and sense of solidarity must have crystallised in Bacon’s mind as true, human essence, more vivid than any studio-bound model. As Ted told The Observer, Bacon once mused over whisky in the Colony Room, saying he liked to observe people when they were drunk, caught off-guard, so he could truly see them.
Recovering Ted’s story is also a triumph for Bacon scholarship. Until now, only half a dozen of Bacon’s sitters are still alive - Mick Jagger being among the well-known few. Ted’s reappearance not only adds another name to that exclusive list but deepens our understanding of Bacon’s social world in the late 1960s. Soho, then as now, was a mixing ground of aristocrats, artists, gangsters, and working-class luminaries. Ted’s presence in Bacon’s orbit exemplifies the poet-painter’s restless engagement with both high and low, the cultured elite and the everyday outlaw.
The significance here isn’t merely biographical. It’s also artistic. Study for Portrait is now contextualised by Ted’s memories: the encounter in the club, the photography session, their meals at Wheeler’s, and even Bacon’s sleepwalking with money to lose. These personal anecdotes animate the painting in ways that autograph catalogues and exhibition notes fail to capture. You can feel Ted still co-existing within the canvas: the man who once taught Bacon to “eat well,” who corrected him on Soho’s moral geography, and who earned Palme d’Or–style praise for a polite “Cheerio!” toast in Paris to President Pompidou.
Ted’s son contributed letters and photographs collected over the years to the Estate, and Harrison confirmed their authenticity. Between them, they pieced together a decades-old puzzle that even the most tenacious art historians had failed to solve.
This rediscovery offers a reminder that, even in our digitised era, there are still treasures in the margins - memories that survive in family archives or street gossip, waiting for someone to connect them to an artwork. With each rediscovered sitter, Bacon’s paintings recover their original texture and emotional geography. This rediscovery also sets a precedent: as other private papers or personal testimonies emerge, more paintings may yet yield their hidden sitters.
For collectors and enthusiasts of Francis Bacon, Ted’s identification transforms Study for Portrait from a compelling face into the face of a real, grounded person who lived and breathed alongside the artist. It reanimates the painting from a stylistic or formal achievement into a compassionate, lived encounter between two men from vastly different worlds.
In unveiling Ted’s story, The Observer has provided a rare moment of human illumination in the often abstract world of art history. This is more than provenance; it’s a moment of recovery, of narrative integrity, uniting image and biography in a new, affecting way.
Curious to read the full feature? Check out The Observer’s original story here: "Isn’t that you, Ted?": The hunt for one of Francis Bacon’s last living subjects.
