Miroir de la Tauromachie (1990) by Francis Bacon is one of the most significant print projects of his late career — a suite of four lithographs comprising a triptych of bullfighting scenes alongside a portrait of Michel Leiris, made in direct response to Leiris's essay of the same name and representing one of the very few times Bacon worked in explicit collaboration with a writer's ideas.

The relationship between Bacon and Leiris had been one of the most intellectually sustaining of his late life. Leiris's Miroir de la Tauromachie, first published in 1938, read the corrida not as sport or spectacle but as a philosophical structure — the matador's art defined by the deliberate narrowing of the margin between life and death, the body brought into proximity with the bull's horn and held there with absolute stillness, control asserted at the exact moment it might fail entirely. For Leiris, this was the only honest art form, one in which the stakes were genuinely terminal. For Bacon, who had spent his career insisting that painting needed the same quality of risk — the image arrived at through chance and accident rather than illustration, sensation rather than narrative — the essay described exactly what he was attempting on canvas. The suite can be acquired as a complete set of four or as individual works, each sheet hand-signed in pencil by Bacon and printed by Mourlot in Paris in a limited edition of 150.

Looking at the triptych, the three panels burn with the specific chromatic memory of the corrida — saturated oranges and yellows, the colour of afternoon light on arena sand, of heat and dust and the atmosphere of the bullring that Bacon had experienced directly on his travels through southern France and Spain. Across the three sheets, bulls and figures move in dynamic, contorted forms that blur the boundary between human and animal — the matador and the bull caught in the same fluid, violent space, neither fully dominant, the outcome of the encounter held open. The baying audience visible in the background presses in from the sides, the Roman standard flying above them anchoring the scene within a tradition of ritualised combat stretching back to the gladiatorial arena.

The fourth sheet — the portrait of Leiris — completes the suite by making its intellectual context explicit. The face is compressed and displaced in Bacon's characteristic manner, identity present but unstable, the features held between recognition and dissolution. It is a portrait of the man whose thinking gave the whole project its meaning, placed alongside the images that thinking produced — a collaboration between two friends who shared an obsession with mortality, the body under pressure, and the limits of what art can honestly show.

For more information or to buy Miroir de la Tauromachie by Francis Bacon, or any of the individual works within the suite, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.