Francis Bacon’s Miroir de la Tauromachie (1990) is a striking triptych lithograph that encapsulates the artist’s enduring fascination with violence, spectacle, and the raw physicality of the human—and animal—condition. Based on the ritualistic intensity of the bullfight, a theme Bacon returned to throughout his career, this work transforms the traditional spectacle of tauromachia into a psychological and aesthetic battlefield. Executed in his final years, the triptych reveals Bacon’s undiminished ability to fuse brutality with beauty, abstraction with immediacy.

Printed in Paris by the renowned Mourlot studio and published by Galerie Lelong, Miroir de la Tauromachie was produced as a limited edition of 150 sets, each composed of three separate lithographic sheets printed on fine Arches paper. Each sheet is hand-signed in pencil by Bacon, underscoring the importance of the edition as a collector’s piece and a key work in the artist’s late printmaking oeuvre. Individually, the sheets measure 48 × 36 cm; when framed as a triptych, the total dimensions extend to 151 × 78 cm. The work is documented in major catalogue references, including Alexandre Tacou (no. 37) and Bruno Sabatier (nos. 29–30), confirming its significance within the canon of Bacon’s prints.

Visually, the composition is arresting. Across the three panels, Bacon conjures a chaotic ballet of muscular bulls and abstracted human forms, locked in ambiguous confrontation. Their twisted bodies—half-formed, half-dissolved—are rendered in deep blacks and earthy reds, placed against saturated fields of vivid orange, electric yellow, and moody blue. These backgrounds heighten the drama of the scene, creating a jarring contrast between the intensity of the forms and the purity of the surrounding colour. The result is a visual rhythm that suggests both motion and stasis, energy and obliteration.

As in many of Bacon’s works, the figures are at once figurative and abstract. Limbs, horns, and torsos blend into one another, often indistinguishable from the background, giving the impression of movement frozen at the edge of collapse. Bacon avoids literal representation, opting instead for psychological suggestion. The contorted forms evoke the violence and elegance of the bullfight, not as a literal event but as an existential metaphor—an arena where instincts, suffering, and survival intersect.

Bacon had long been drawn to the symbolic intensity of bullfighting. Its ritualistic choreography and stark confrontation between life and death mirrored many of the tensions that defined his practice. In Miroir de la Tauromachie, the matador and the bull become interchangeable—both participants in a violent dance, both condemned to suffer. The absence of clear narrative or identifiable figures deepens the sense of disorientation, echoing Bacon’s broader interest in distortion as a means of expressing psychological truth.

The title, which translates as “Mirror of the Bullfight,” invites reflection—both literal and metaphorical. Rather than presenting a documentary image, Bacon offers a mirror in which the viewer sees not the bullring but themselves. The arena becomes a symbolic stage for the drama of existence itself: power, pain, defiance, and demise, rendered through Bacon’s unique visual vocabulary.

The triptych format, one of Bacon’s most favored structures, further enhances the theatricality and narrative fragmentation of the piece. Each panel can be viewed as a scene in a tragic play or a frame in an unfolding psychological sequence. Yet there is no linear story, no resolution—only a confrontation with primal forces rendered in paint and paper.

Ultimately, Miroir de la Tauromachie is a masterful example of Bacon’s ability to compress the most extreme aspects of human and animal experience into a unified, dynamic visual statement. At once elegant and grotesque, formal and chaotic, it serves as both a late-career triumph and a summation of the artist’s thematic obsessions. Through distorted anatomy, vibrant colour fields, and a charged sense of space, Bacon renders tauromachia not as cultural tradition, but as existential spectacle—an image of life suspended on the edge of annihilation.