“In what was Bacon's most prolific year for small self-portraits, none is more incisively painted than this painting or more closely aligned with Degas's pastels in its predominantly blue and pink palette" MARTIN HARRISON, FRANCIS BACON, CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ, VOLUME IV, 1971–92, LONDON 2016, P. 1022 This 1972 self-portrait exemplifies Francis Bacon's unflinching interrogation of the human face, rendering his own likeness as a visceral, torqued mass of flesh caught between dissolution and formation. The characteristic Baconian distortion — the face wrenched open, features spiraling away from anatomical logic — achieves a raw psychological intensity against the dark, unmodulated ground. Executed in his signature pastel-and-oil technique on canvas, the work belongs to a critical period of self-portraiture following the 1971 suicide of his lover George Dyer, lending it an undercurrent of existential anguish. As one of art history's most compelling self-examinations, this painting represents a museum-caliber holding from the apex of Bacon's career.