It is the first of two portraits Bacon made of his close friend, the French surrealist writer and anthropologist Michel Leiris;[1] the second followed in 1978.

[2] The painting has been in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, since it was gifted by Michel and Louise Leiris in 1984.

[4] Leiris is depicted against a flat black background,[5] his face rendered in a radial swirl of luminous colours,[4] his features distorted in a style typical of Bacon's portraits of the 1960s and 1970s.

Only his left eye remains intact from these distortions, and is over-sized compared to the rest of his face; the theme of the painting seems to center on the sense of vision.

For the same reason, and because of its reconstruction of the human head, it has also been compared to African tribal masks, which Bacon was keenly interested in.