An “incredibly moving” and rarely seen painting by Francis Bacon, in which he reflects on his impending death, is to be exhibited in the UK for the first time. The 2-metre high painting, Study of a Bull, is Bacon’s final work and was produced in the artist’s famously shambolic studio in South Kensington, London, just days before his death in 1992. It shows a bull backing away from life into a void. “We sense that the bull, which could be the artist, is about to enter the dark just behind him,” said Michael Peppiatt, Bacon’s friend and biographer. “The bull is poised between the lure of life and the inevitability of death. It is incredibly moving.” The painting’s existence, in what has been described as “a very private, private collection”, only became known in 2016. Before that it had not been publicly viewed, reproduced, discussed or written about. In 2021 it will be a star exhibit in a new Bacon show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the first to chart his development as an artist through his fascination with animals. Peppiatt, a friend and almost surrogate son for three decades, recalls talking to Bacon when he was painting it. “It was the last time I talked to him,” he said. He wanted to meet up but Bacon was reluctant. “He said, ‘I just can’t come out … I’ve got no energy.’ Of course, he was the most energetic person you could ever meet, he had amazing vitality. I didn’t realise that when he said he was ‘ill, really ill’ that he was on the edge.” A fortnight later Bacon, regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, died aged 82. The new show, curated by Peppiatt, will include 45 paintings including some of the artist’s earliest works made in the 1930s and 1940s. Bacon had a lifelong fascination with animals, said Peppiatt. He liked watching chimps at the zoo, tracked them on trips to South Africa and amassed a huge collection of wildlife books. The artist believed he could see true, normally camouflaged, human nature in animals. “He was trying to find basic instinct,” said Peppiatt. “Bacon didn’t mess about, he wanted to know about life, about death, about instinct, fear, anger. I think he learned a lot about human nature from animals.” Bacon went on to produce some of the most psychologically brutal paintings in the history of art. Works on display will include Head 1, lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in which he reduces the human form to a snarling mouth with fangs. The painting originated from a photograph of a chimpanzee. There will also be two “screaming pope” portraits, works inspired by Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, in which the divine power of the sitter is replaced by the helplessness of a caged animal. A particular highlight will be the display, together for the first time, of a trio of bullfight paintings that, according to curators, explore “the fine lines between flesh and meat, violence and eroticism, life and death”. A 21-year-old Peppiatt first met Bacon, one of life’s hedonists, in Soho in 1963 and they became friends for life. “I don’t how I survived it,” he said. “We were very different people but in a nutshell I was fascinated by him and he became very important to me, he was a father figure. You might say he was a strange father to have … but he was never boring!” He said now was a good time to have a Bacon show and that his art remained strikingly prescient. “Obviously he had no inkling of this ghastly disease but he had a very strong inkling about humanity’s solitude. There is a very strong sense of isolation in Bacon’s work, people in their four walls and closed off space. “Bacon has an extraordinary capacity for being very clear-eyed about humanity’s destiny.” • Francis Bacon: Man and Beast will be in the main galleries of the RA, London, 30 January-18 April 2021