Francis Bacon is celebrated as one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. From the 1940s to his death in 1992, he worked consistently as a painter, ignoring other passing, fashionable trends in art. Throughout his career, the human figure was the dominant subject in his work: his paintings of men and women go far beyond a simple likeness and instead are portraits of complex psychological states. In two essays, this book examines forty of some of his most intense works: his small-format portraits.