Francis Bacon Studio Display Cases

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13 January 2009

The work of pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) was of crucial importance and of enormous interest to Francis Bacon. Muybridge
undertook extensive high-speed photographic studies of human and animal locomotion and showed in frieze frame stills how the human body and animal moves. Edgar Degas found Muybridge's photographs of horses very helpful for his modelling of thoroughbred horses, an exquisite example of which is in the
Hugh Lane's collection. Similarly Muybridge's photographs provided Bacon with an encyclopaedic range of poses from which to draw for the artist's increasingly ambitious figure painting.