On view in the Francis Bacon Studio display cases.
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.
A selection of similar material from Bacon’s Studio Archive at Hugh Lane Gallery is currently on loan to a major exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia (7 December 2014 – 8 March 2015). The exhibition, entitled Francis Bacon and the Art of the Past, is the first exhibition of Bacon’s work in Russia since 1988 and presents twenty paintings by Bacon placed in the context of masterpieces from the State Hermitage collection: Egyptian mummy masks, Roman and Renaissance sculpture, including Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy, and a number of the museum’s most famous works including portraits by Rembrandt and Velázquez. It also includes works by Ingres, Matisse, Van Gogh and Degas’s pastel of a woman after her toilette. The selection of material from the Hugh Lane forms a bridge between the old and the new, the real and the reproduction and offers a unique opportunity to explore Bacon’s relationship with his rich artistic heritage.
