Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes

Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes is an oil-on-canvas 1963 triptych by the Irish-born British figurative painter Francis Bacon.

[1] Comparing the panels to Giorgione's self-portrait in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick, art critic John Russell wrote, "This is the most ... that can be said in painting at this time about human beauty".

In fact, the distortions of Bacon's panels are restrained by the standards of his late 1960s and early 70s portraits, in which of some the sitter's faces disappears completely, replaced by eye sockets, or smears of broad paint representing caved in cheek or jaw bones.

Bacon did not intend his distortions or chromatic swirls – often applied by a brush with a towel – as gratuitous indicators of violence or despair as often assumed, but rather as representations of the effects of time, age and life on the sitter's physical features.

While using tools such as towels to apply broad streaks of paint was chancy and indicated the gambler aspect to his personality, Bacon was sustained by a painterly ability built up during more than 25 years as an artist.