Francis Bacon is celebrated as one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. From the 1940s to his death in 1992 he worked consistently as a painter, ignoring other passing, fashionable trends in art. Throughout his career, the human figure was the dominant subject in his work: his paintings of men and women go far beyond a simple likeness and instead are portraits of complex psychological states. This book has been produced to coincide with the 2005 summer exhibition, which will be held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. In two essays, the book examines fifty of some of his most intense works: his small-format portraits. This will be the first museum exhibition devoted to this fascinating aspect of his work and the first on Francis Bacon in Scotland.