The two versions share a composition but not a mood. In the 1944 original, painted in oil and pastel on hardboard at a smaller scale, the vivid orange ground runs across all three panels, giving the writhing figures a shared, inescapable field of colour. In the 1988 remake, Bacon shrank that orange down to a narrow stripe behind the central figure alone, so the outer two panels sit in comparatively muted surroundings while the middle one stays trapped in its original intensity^[2]. He also added a metal plate, fixed with two visible screws, to the central figure's torso, an addition with no equivalent in the 1944 version, which reads as a device for pinning the creature in place rather than a naturalistic detail^[2]. The right-hand figure, which had sat somewhat asymmetrically to its left-hand counterpart in 1944, was repainted to balance it more closely, concentrating the viewer's attention on the panel in between rather than spreading it evenly across all three.

The 1944 original was Bacon's first major public statement. He had returned to London from a wartime lodge near Bedales school and set up a studio in a flat that had once belonged to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Millais, finishing the triptych there in 1944^[1]. Showing it at the Lefevre Gallery the following year was a considerable risk for an artist with no real public standing, and the reaction split sharply: Raymond Mortimer's dismissal as mere outrage sat alongside a slower recognition that Bacon had found a new, extreme register for figurative painting^[1]. By painting a second, larger version more than four decades later, Bacon effectively restated his own founding statement at the height of his fame, giving Tate two versions of the same picture separated by a working lifetime.

Bacon used the triptych, historically a three-part altarpiece format built around a central image, throughout his career, for the Crucifixion and for entirely secular subjects alike. He treated it as a way to multiply a motif across several canvases meant to be seen together rather than read in sequence, and he was explicit that keeping the panels physically separate served that purpose: painting figures on three different canvases, he told David Sylvester, helped him avoid storytelling^[2]. That refusal of narrative is part of why the Crucifixion recurs so often in his work despite his own irreligion. He described it as a magnificent armature, a ready-made structure onto which he could hang feeling and sensation without being bound to illustrate a biblical episode^[3].