Edition of 100 with Arabic numbering and a further edition of 46 with Roman numbering. Inspired by the painting of the same title in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

Produced in 1977 and published the following year, after Portrait of Michel Leiris (1976) translates one of Francis Bacon’s intimate late portraits into etching and aquatint. The print derives from Bacon’s 1976 painting of the French writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, now in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and reflects the close intellectual and personal relationship between artist and sitter.

Leiris’s head emerges from a dark, compressed field, his features disrupted by curved lines and sweeping tonal passages. While one eye remains sharply articulated, the surrounding face appears to shift and dissolve, creating an impression of psychological and physical instability. The layered aquatint tones reproduce the density of Bacon’s painted surface while retaining the distinctive linear character of the printed medium.

Bacon met Leiris in 1965, and the two developed a friendship grounded in their shared preoccupation with mortality, identity and the vulnerability of the human body. Leiris became one of Bacon’s most perceptive interpreters, writing the introduction to the artist’s 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Bacon, in turn, produced several portraits of Leiris, approaching his features not as a fixed likeness but as a continually changing record of presence and perception.

Through its tension between recognition and distortion, after Portrait of Michel Leiris (1976) extends Bacon’s challenge to conventional portraiture. The sitter remains identifiable, yet his likeness is subjected to forces that suggest the instability of both flesh and identity. Published by Les Éditions Georges Visat et Cie, Paris, the present impression is signed in pencil and numbered XL/XLVI from the Roman-numeral edition of 46; a further 100 impressions were numbered in Arabic numerals. Catalogued as Sabatier 2, the work is presented framed and in excellent condition. A detailed condition report is available upon request.

For further information on the original painting please visit the Francis Bacon Estate page: https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/portrait-michel-leiris