High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Irish-born artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992) painted 28 known large triptychs between 1944 and 1985–86. He began working in the format in the mid-1940s with a number of smaller scale works before graduating to large examples in 1962. He followed the larger style for 30 years, although he painted a number of smaller scale triptychs of friend`s heads, and after the death of his former lover George Dyer in 1971, the three acclaimed "Black triptychs".