National Galleries of Scotland

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin to English parents and spent time in Berlin and Paris before settling in London. Bacon said that painting only became important to him around 1945, when his controversial triptych of the previous year, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Tate) was exhibited in London. This room’s 1991 portrait repeats Bacon’s motif of the camera tripod from this triptych, indicating the importance of photography to his working methods across fifty years of painting.

Isabel Rawsthorne was a close friend and collaborator of Bacon’s, and his subject for numerous portraits in the late 1960s. Her paintings were widely admired in London during the 1950s and 1960s; a time when she also designed for ballet and opera productions, and drew ballet dancers from life during their rehearsals.

London-born Leon Kossoff’s practice demanded intense observation of his subject. Kossoff concentrated on portraits of family and friends and London cityscapes, particularly railway scenes. In 1954 German émigré Frank Auerbach took over Kossoff’s Camden Town studio, where he works to this day. His portraits involve multiple regular sittings – sometimes over many years. Auerbach’s densely worked paintings question many assumptions surrounding portraiture as a genre.