One of Francis Bacon’s last great paintings could fetch more than €30m

Bacon captures passage of time

The first panel of the Francis Bacon triptych is based on press pictures of US president Woodrow Wilson in 1919.

WHEN it was shown in Moscow in 1988, Francis Bacon’s Triptych 1986-87 was the first painting by a well-known artist from the West to be shown in Soviet Russia.

It was a sea change in the country’s political attitude towards art. The Iron Curtain would fall the following year. One of Bacon’s last great paintings is a meditation on the passage of time and the solitude of the human condition.