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Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1966

Lithograph on paper
framed with 3mm ArtGlass Lifetime Museum Acrylic

39.4 x 38.4 cm (framed)

unknown edition size

Henrietta Moraes, born Audrey Wendy Abbott, (22 May 1931 – 6 January 1999) was a British artists’ model and memoirist. During the 1950s and 1960s, she was the muse and inspiration for many artists of the Soho subculture, including Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and (much later) Maggi Hambling, and also known for her three marriages and numerous love affairs. Francis Bacon, who was particularly enthralled by her mercurial character, painted her at least sixteen times from photographs specifically commissioned by him from John Deakin.

Francis Bacon (After)

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon claimed that he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style. Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work, which numbers c. 590 extant paintings along with many others he destroyed, typically focused on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats.