• Home
  • Big Screen Classics
  • Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon + intro by art writer and critic Florence Hallett

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

+ intro by art writer and critic Florence Hallett

Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig excel as Francis Bacon and George Dyer in John Maybury’s study of an ill-starred romance.

  • Director

    John Maybury

  • With

    Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton, Anne Lambton

  • UK 1998. 91min

  • Digital

  • Certificate

    15

Subtitled ‘Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon’, this charts the steady decline of the painter’s relationship with lover, model and muse George Dyer, a small-time crook Bacon first encounters burgling his house. The clash of personalities and social groups (Soho sophisticates and East End criminals) produces a sharp drama built around dominance and submission; the two leads are excellent, the images fittingly febrile.

See another screening of this film.

Also available on BFI Player