Bacon and Eliot
hangs from the ceiling at an angle to the wall behind it, featuring a black box horizontal to the far wall that highlights the figure ’ s face. The face is the most detailed aspect of the painting with its shut eyes and contorted mouth constructed using fine brushstrokes with white impasto marks etched on it. It appears to be turning away from the winged form in the window identified to be one of the Eumenides; its limbs are elongated, and it has a beak cast downwards by the curve in its spine. The figure appears to be contorting away from this figure with movement illustrated through the turning of the face, the twisted legs, the circle around the knee and the curve of the chair they sit upon.
The work is a return to Bacon’s beginning as an artist and the inspirations he drew from T.S. Eliot’s play The Family Reunion 35 years earlier. The painting draws on a specific stage direction at the end of Act II where:
[The curtains part, revealing the Eumenides in the window embrasure.] 35
That the painting perhaps illustrates this, with the creature framed by a bevelled opening marking it to be an embrasure, is confirmed in an interview between Sylvester and Bacon, where it is referred to by Sylvester as a ‘Eumenides outside the window’ . 36 The painting is significant in discussing Bacon and the Eumenides, as it shows that he was more drawn to Eliot’s interpretation of the Eumenides after the death of George Dyer than with other depictions of the Eumenides.
This develops to become a recognizable typology of how Bacon would come to depict the Eumenides, with the visual construction of it here being replicated in Bacon’s 1982 painting Study for a Eumenides , which shares the same curved convex form and elongated limbs.
The ‘Black triptychs’ Triptych May June 1973
[Illustration 6] STUDY FOR THE EUMENIDES
1982
Oil, pastel and dry transfer lettering on canvas
78 x 58 in. (198 x 147.5 cm)
https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/study-eumenides
35 Eliot 1939: 60. 36 Sylvester and Bacon 2016: 156.
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