Music like Syringe

Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe is a 1968 oil on canvas panel painting by the Irish born, English artist Francis Bacon. It is the second of two similarly titled paintings based on nude photographs of his close friend Henrietta Moraes, who is shown in a reclining position on a bed, themselves part of a wider series of collapsed figures on beds that began with the 1963 triptych Lying Figure. This later version is widely considered the more successful of the two panels.

Moraes and Bacon were drinking friends, she was a favourite model and he depicted her over a dozen times in a variety of forms, including single panel portraits, triptych portraits, and as part of larger scale figurations such as this panel. They knew each other from Soho's Colony Club, where they often met with John Deakin, another close friend, and a photographer whom Bacon commission to take the photographs on which the painting is based.