Francis Bacon at the NPG review: a gut punch of a show that's oddly uplifting despite all the darkness

It’s the pity of it that hits you. The very last work in the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition of Francis Bacon’s portraits is like a gut punch.

Triptych May-June 1973 is atypical of the artist’s work in that it clearly represents a real event, but then, not even Bacon’s imagination could compete with the horrible, prolonged death from an overdose of his lover George Dyer, in the bathroom of a Paris hotel in 1971.