But the effect of the slumped figure, rendered into a colorscape so turbulent, with the presence of ominous microphones and perhaps a gun, is truly stultifying. There is terror, yes, but what constitutes the beauty is the artist’s will to vision. Bacon has manifested something both captivating and disturbing, and when you experience this piece you are getting both the materialization and the idea simultaneously. The artist’s vision is hardly typical. He once claimed he wished to paint a mouth like Monet painted a sunset. We can only wonder what kind of sunset Bacon was actually seeing. But that is what artists do. They see beyond our capacity.
     Another curiosity about the exhibition is the choice of title. A Terrible Beauty is taken from the W.B. Yeats poem “Easter 1916”, which celebrates the spirit of the 1916 uprising against the British rule. Initially, its application to Bacon seems incongruous, as he was not a figure associated with Irish cultural nationalism. The fact that Bacon was Irish has, at least until now, been broadly overlooked. Rightly or wrongly, he is not included in the modern national canon alongside figures like Wilde, Joyce, or Beckett. However, Bacon’s library included Richard Ellmann’s biographies of Wilde, Joyce, and Yeats. Hugh Lane director, Barbara Dawson, says that Yeats’ poetry was of great importance to him: “Bacon found in Yeats what he was looking for. Yeats foresaw what has become the sensation of the 20th century, which is shock.”
     But is there more at stake? Yeats’ lines referring to “a terrible beauty” herald a new and desperate Irish will to self-determination. Long suspicious of the 1916 rebel leaders, the poet was blindsided by the events that led to their martyrdom.