 For him it amounted to a kind of self-portraiture; a vehicle for working on "all sorts of very private feelings about behaviour and about the way life is".Coming in 1944, the triptych was often thought to be informed by the Second World War.Art critic Ziva Amishai-Maisseles observes that the canvas reflects Bacon's own confusion and ambivalence "towards manifestations of violence and power, both of which attracted and repulsed him simultaneously."