Francis Bacon: "Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint."

Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror,1968, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

"Perhaps one day I will manage to capture an instant of life in all its violence and all its beauty. That would be the definitive painting." Francis Bacon succeeded in capturing that "instant of life," while no other artist was able to convey as he did the most sordid and frightening sides of human nature. With his existentialist character, Bacon has been the painter who has most fully and successfully represented modern man's alienation and vulnerability.

This double Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror is one of the numerous portraits which Bacon made of Dyer, his lover from the mid 1960s until his suicide in 1971. Here he is depicted alone like all Bacon's characters, isolated in an empty space and representing man's loneliness in a hostile world; it is as if by solely concentrating on the figure Bacon wanted to remind the viewer of the autonomous nature of existence.