Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror by Francis Bacon shows something almost without precedent in his work — a figure engaged in the act of writing. No other known image in his painted or printed output places a subject at this specific task, which makes the work as much a document of Bacon's own preoccupations as a formal composition.

The figure is a man in white underwear, seated and bent over his work, crumpled papers scattered across the floor beneath him. The posture is familiar — the compressed, inward-turning body that Bacon returned to throughout his career — but the context is different. This is not a figure under physical pressure or existential examination. It is a figure attempting to communicate, and apparently failing, the discarded sheets suggesting an effort that cannot find its form.

George Dyer, whom Bacon had met in the early 1960s and whose death by suicide on the eve of the Grand Palais retrospective in October 1971 had reshaped everything that followed, haunts the image. The figure here, with its dark hair and concentrated posture, carries enough of Dyer's physical presence to suggest portraiture without confirming it — a deliberate ambiguity that allows Bacon to place himself and Dyer in the same body simultaneously, mourner and mourned occupying the same compressed space.

The mirror compounds this. Bacon used mirrors throughout his work as devices that double and destabilise rather than clarify — the reflection not confirming the figure's presence but placing it under a second examination. Here the writing figure and its reflection together suggest the inescapability of memory, the way grief continues to produce itself regardless of the effort to move past it.

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