Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X

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Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a 1953 painting by Irish-British artist Francis Bacon. It shows a distorted version of Pope Innocent X, head of the Catholic Church from 1644 to 1655, as depicted in Spanish artist Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X (c. 1650). After Head VI (1949), the work is one of the first in a series of around 50 variants of Velázquez's portrait which Bacon painted from 1949 to 1971. Of the old masters, Bacon favoured Velázquez, Titian, Rembrandt, and Francisco Goya's late works. He kept an extensive inventory of images for source material but preferred not to confront the major works in person. Having deliberately avoided it for years, he saw Portrait of Innocent X in person only much later in his life. Study after Velázquez's Portrait has been the subject of detailed analysis by several scholars. David Sylvester described it as, along with Head VI, "the finest pope Bacon produced".

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