Head II

Head II is an oil and tempera on hardboard painting by the Irish-born British figurative artist Francis Bacon. Completed in 1948, it is the second in a series of six heads, painted from the winter of 1948 in preparation for a November 1949 exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, London.^[1]

Head II
Artist	Francis Bacon
Year	1949
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	80.5 cm × 65 cm (31.7 in × 26 in)
Location	Ulster Museum, Belfast

The figure seems half human, half animal, and has disintegrated to an extent that, like the preceding Head I of the series, the entire upper head has disappeared, leaving only mouth and jaw. The figure is set in a shallow pictorial space, and is positioned behind curtains that borrow from Titian's 1558 Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto. The curtains are fastened at one point by a safety pin. John Russell sees the curtains as enclosing the figure, as if the walls of a prison or execution dock. Remarking on their dreary and drab appearance, he further speculates that they seem "stiffened by fifty years' crassness of a tenth-rate lodging-house; or they could be sliding shutters that have been pulled apart to admit a new victim."^[2]

The painting's overall grisaille appearance gives the impression of x-ray photographs, and K.C. Clark's Positioning may have inspired the look in Radiography, a book Bacon often acknowledged as a key source for his work. The painting contains a small arrow just below the figure's mouth; the first appearance of a motif the artist was to continue using for the rest of his career.^[3]

See also

• List of paintings by Francis Bacon