Francis Bacon’s work is haunted by repetition: distorted faces, ghostly interiors, screaming mouths - and seated figures. Across the decades, from his early Pope series to his late portraits of lovers and friends, Bacon returned obsessively to the pose of the seated human form. At first glance, this might seem like a formal convenience. But in Bacon’s hands, the chair becomes far more than a compositional prop. It’s a psychological device. A cage. A stage. A form of confinement as much as containment. For an artist whose work is anything but static, this might seem paradoxical. So why did Bacon return so persistently to the seated figure?
To understand this, we have to consider how Bacon saw the body: not as a thing to be admired in stillness, but as a fragile, volatile container of emotion and violence. A seated figure, for Bacon, was not about repose. It was a trap. It offered him a structure on which to twist, contort, and flay his subjects. The seat was a tool, not a comfort.
Bacon himself was clear about what fascinated him. “I like doing seated figures because I find them the easiest to distort,” he told art critic David Sylvester during their famed series of interviews between 1962 and 1986. Seated figures, fixed in space, allowed him to intensify the body’s vulnerability. The stability of the pose gave him the freedom to dismantle it - twisting flesh, disfiguring faces, and blurring identity with visceral energy.
He wasn’t interested in capturing likeness. He was interested in what he called “the brutality of fact” - the raw, unfiltered presence of a person. The act of sitting, far from suggesting repose, was for Bacon a moment of psychological exposure. Immobilised and isolated within the tight architectural frameworks he often painted around them - suggestive of cages, stages, or interrogation rooms - these seated subjects are frozen in states of existential crisis. There’s no escape, no distraction, just a forced confrontation between subject and viewer.
Art history also played a role. Bacon was deeply influenced by Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c.1650), a work he never saw in person yet reimagined repeatedly. In these versions, the papal throne transforms into a trap, and the serene grandeur of Velázquez’s original gives way to horror, anguish and psychological collapse. As Bacon said, “I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror”. The chair becomes a kind of modern crucifix - an upright slab of silent judgement.
The throne motif echoes throughout his practice, not just in the Popes, but in paintings of George Dyer, John Edwards, Lucian Freud and others. Often set within a simplified interior space, the chair anchors the body within a flattened void, a recurring visual strategy that allowed Bacon to control and heighten the drama. According to art historian Martin Harrison, who authored the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné (2016), these pictorial structures, what he calls Bacon’s “space-frames”, were tools for psychological containment, reminiscent of theatre sets or surgical chambers.
There’s also the element of time. Bacon was a deeply nostalgic painter, despite his brutal modernity. Many of his later seated figures, particularly those of his lost lover George Dyer, feel like elegies. They are suspended in memory. The seated pose becomes ritualised, like a recurring dream. There’s a tension in this repetition: a desire to both remember and destroy. As he told Sylvester, “If you can talk about the moment of truth in painting, it's when the image starts to take on a life of its own”.
In print, this motif remains just as potent. Bacon’s lithographs and etchings often revisit these same structures. Seated Figure (1974) and Study for a Seated Man (1981) show how the pose functioned as a foundational architecture across media. Whether in oil or ink, the seated body becomes a site of scrutiny and transformation - held down, framed in space, yet always on the edge of disintegration.
From a compositional point of view, the chair provided balance amid chaos. Bacon’s violent brushwork needed something to anchor them. The formality of the seated pose allowed the surrounding distortion to feel deliberate, almost sculptural. It’s a paradox: the more fixed the posture, the more violently it can be dismantled.
At Andipa Editions, we see the seated figure as one of Bacon’s great visual signatures - not because it offers rest, but because it offers resistance. These are not passive bodies. They are straining, trembling, held in by the geometry of the chair and the weight of their own interior lives. They speak to mortality, memory, and the thin line between form and collapse.
