Richard Hamilton

Based on a Polaroid picture taken by artist Francis Bacon, this portrait by Richard Hamilton combines two inexpensive processes—collotype and screenprint. Working closely with professional printers, Hamilton wanted to push back on the “perfection” of commercial printing technologies like collotype by incorporating the painterly textures of screenprint. As he described:

Beautiful as the [collotype] process is . . . , I never felt that I could leave it there. The smooth flat surface asks for a rougher touch to break the perfection of tone, the soft, watery tonalities achieved with a deceptive ease.

Like many artists of the time, Richard Hamilton took an interest in instant photography when the Polaroid Corporation introduced it to a popular audience in the

late 1960s, making artist’s books of Polaroid portraits taken of him by other artists. The painter Francis Bacon (English, 1909-1992) took this image on July 14, 1969, over lunch in a London restaurant. The lighting was poor, so Hamilton positioned himself to take advantage of the brightest spot. The first image was blurred so

Bacon took more, but Hamilton liked the blurred image because it resembled Bacon’s painting style. With Bacon’s permission, he transformed the image into the

print you see here, adding, with coaching from Bacon, a background that imitated Bacon’s painting style.