CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/1/2016

Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné

"Study After Velázquez" (1950) is reproduced from Martin Harrison's remarkable 1556-page, five-volume "canon-scrambling" Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, released this week from the Estate of Francis Bacon. This painting was one of three Screaming Popes that Bacon painted together, then withheld from exhibition. Bacon destroyed one of the three paintings himself, and apparently ordered the other two to be destroyed by his framer, who secretly did not comply. Noted curator and critic David Sylvester recalled that "Bacon more than once 'greatly regretted' the destruction of this painting, which, on the basis of a 1950 photograph, Sylvester suspected was Bacon's 'finest Pope ever.'"