Study for Portrait of Van Gogh II, 1957

After a seven-year phase during which his output of large paintings was dominated by sombre monochromes, Bacon emphatically broke out of the ‘black cavern’ with the Van Gogh series. Painted in some of the most vivid colours of his career, and applied with a broad, loaded brysh, the thick impasto in suggestive of Karel Appel, Willem de Kooning and – especially – Chaim Soutine. Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, 1016, p. 498.