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Leiris is depicted against a flat black background, his face rendered in a radial swirl of luminous colours,  his features distorted in a style typical of Bacon's portraits of the 1960s and 1970s. Only his left eye remains intact from these distortions, and is over-sized compared to the rest of his face; the theme of the painting seems to center on the sense of vision. He sees to be, according to the critic Ernst van Alphen "under the influence of something he sees. He is in a kind of hypnotic trance".The painting places an emphasis on Leiri's skull, and has been compared x-ray photographs used as source for his 1933 Crucifixion. For the same reason, and because of its reconstruction of the human head, it has also been compared to African Tribal masks, which Bacon was keenly interested in.
Tribal mask