Francis Bacon’s haunting portraits reflect post-war European anxieties and his personal struggles. Featuring abstracted faces and crucifixes in unsettling settings, his work, influenced by Van Gogh and Velázquez, captures the chaos of modern life. Achieving acclaim from his mid-thirties, Bacon exhibited globally and his artworks are housed in major museums, fetching over $100 million at auction. Notably, his 1969 triptych, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, set an auction record at $142.4 million in 2013.