At seventy the artist appears ageless, not a day older than in his first self-portrait, painted in 1956. Bacon had begun to make close-up portraits in 1961, filling canvases measuring about a square foot with heads slightly smaller than lifesize. After a while he began to combine three such canvases, turning them into triptychs, a format that was central to his artistic approach.

Bacon disdained what he called "literal" painting. Instead, he offered an abbreviated, but also more intense, perception of the model. To that end he used distortion, fragmentation, and a fluid and swift stroke that invited accidents and chance. In this work his own face, rather normally proportioned in the center painting, is flanked by grotesquely distorted, blurred versions at the sides. The overall effect is of the artist's having subjected himself to a quick yet probing examination in a mirror, an effect accentuated by the word "studies" in the title.