take a look at yourself!

Francis Bacon made many self portraits and portraits of friends, all with distorted features. His studio was filled with photos, with piles around his easel so high you couldn't see the floor. Some were photos of people he knew or himself, while many were from magazines or images from films.

In his most famous series he combined the image of a nurse's screaming mouth from the classic Eisenstein film about the Bolshevik revolution in Russia with copies of Velazquez's Pope Innocent X.

Bacon did not paint happy or contented paintings - his sitters seem to writhe in pain or distress. His faces are torn up and viewed from different angles at the same time. His black and white source photos, ripped and battered by lying on the floor for years, can be glimpsed in many of his black backgrounded self-portraits.