Study of a Bull, 1991

Although Bacon began a full-scale painting in 1992, it remained unfinished at his death. This was, therefore, the last painting he completed.
The bull is monumental, magisterial, standing motionless and implacable at the top of the picture-field. It is not a Minotaur, as in Picasso’s iconography of the 1930s, but rather a metaphorical bull-man, the noble but threatened beast with which Bacon is identifying. Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, 2016, p. 1392