Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was a Dublin-born artist from an English family. Early on, his homosexuality created a rift with his father, causing Bacon to move to London while still a teenager. Influenced by the work of Picasso, he began drawing and painting in 1927. Bacon’s common subjects include human and animal figures that are grotesquely distorted and often surrounded by cage-like frames. He also made a series of Popes inspired by the Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez. Over time, the triptych became his preferred format. Bacon was notorious for “artistic infanticide”, destroying his works in self-criticism or in reaction to external judgment. Artists close to Bacon include Graham Sutherland and Lucian Freud. Between the Tate Gallery and Guggenheim Museum in New York, there were three retrospectives of Bacon’s work during his lifetime, securing his place in the canon of Modern art. Bacon died on a trip to Spain after contracting pneumonia, which was aggravated by his lifelong difficulty with asthma.