Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967

Laurence Gowing stated that the The Three Studies from the Human Body was a response to ‘Goya’s black pictures in the Prado and an appalling accident to a friend’. The friend was Frank Auerbach observed, Dennis Wirth Miller. Gowing must have obtained this information from Bacon, and the biographical impulse has to be given credence. It also contradicts Bacon’s disavowal of the ‘Black Paintings’, and there are parallels between Bacon’s floating figures and those in Goya’s The Fate and the Fantastic Vision. Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, 2016, P. 844