Mystery masterpiece: the final painting of Francis Bacon, found in ‘very private’ collection

It could be a bull backing in to a burning, black void or one escaping it, moving hopefully into the heavenly light. What seems certain is that this final, extraordinary painting by Francis Bacon, unseen and undocumented until now, is by an artist who knows he is soon to die.

The art historian Martin Harrison on Tuesday revealed Bacon’s final completed painting – a work that has never been publicly seen, reproduced, discussed or written about. Residing in a “very private, private collection” in London, Study of a Bull 1991, only came to light as Harrison worked on editing a catalogue of every work by Bacon , due to be published in April.

Harrison said it was Bacon painting his own death, just as he was in his final Triptych 1991, which is in the collection of MoMA in New York. “Bacon is ready to sign off ... he was so ill,” he said. “He knew exactly what he was doing here. Is the bull making an entrance? Is he receding to somewhere else? To his cremation?”

Most of the two-metre-high painting is deliberately raw canvas. Underneath the bull Bacon has used real dust from his famously shambolic studio in South Kensington . “To me that is terribly poignant,” said Harrison. “He often used to say: ‘Dust is eternal, after all we all return to dust.’”

The bull also testifies to Bacon’s enduring fascination with bullfighting, a subject he first addressed in 1969 and returned to a handful of times until 1987 when he made his only triptych on the theme. Bacon’s introduction to bullfighting was probably through the writings of his great friend, the French surrealist Michel Leiris, and it is no coincidence that Leiris died a year before Bacon completed this final bull painting.

The artist was 82 when he finished Study of a Bull and after a lifetime of extensive debauchery things were catching up with him: he was dying and he knew it. “Everything was wrong with him, he was clapped out,” said Harrison. “The drinking, the lifelong asthma. He had a lot of operations but he never made a fuss, he never wanted sympathy, hated hospitals ... he knew his time was up. He always looked younger than he was except for that last year.”