Triptych–August 1972 is an oil on canvas triptych by the British artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992). It was painted in memory of Bacon's lover George Dyer who committed suicide on 24 October 1971, the eve of the artist's retrospective at Paris's Grand Palais, then the highest honour Bacon had received. The work is the second of three "Black Triptychs" completed in the following years as a memorial to his lover. The dates of the last two triptychs are included in their titles, indicating that Bacon intended them as almost diary entries into a very bleak period in his life. As such the paintings are records of how Bacon was coping with the loss of Dyer at that particular time. They are haunted and permeated by the inevitable feelings of guilt experienced by anybody who has lost a close friend to suicide. Context Bacon never really recovered from Dyer's suicide, and never again had such a close or long standing sexual partner. He said, "people say you forget about death, but you don't. After all, I've had a very unfortunate life, because all the people I've been really fond of have died. And you don't stop thinking about them; time doesn't heal." He expanded further in the 1985 South Bank Show documentary he explained further, stating that "[people] are always trying to defeat death by leaving images, but it won't make any difference; we'll just be dead, though the image may live on". The black triptychs are so named because of their bleak mood and due to the active role the black paint plays in each. In essence each is a memento mori, and they are part of a larger series of works painted in the aftermath, a succession of paintings that include smaller single heads of Dyer, and a number of Bacon's self-portraits that extend into the mid 80s, perhaps as far as his late masterpiece, Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86. Of that work he said that people had died "around me like flies and I've had nobody else to paint but myself". In this work Dyer is presented as a figure struggling in vain to survive; in the triptych of 1973 he is finally defeated, naked and vomiting into a toilet basin in one panel, in another wandering towards an open door to lay down and die. The panels in Triptych–August 1972 document the final hours of Dyer's life, but