George Dyer died in a Paris hotel room in October 1971, in the days immediately before a major retrospective of Bacon's paintings opened at the Grand Palais, one of the most significant honours of Bacon's career to that point^[1]. The timing meant Bacon opened his own retrospective already grieving, and the paintings he made afterward carry that weight directly. Robert Hughes described the pictures Bacon painted in strong emotion after Dyer's death as rising to the order of grand lamentation, work that reaches back toward the classical past not for its sculpture but for its sacrifices^[1]. Triptych: August 1972 belongs to this run of paintings, made within the year of Dyer's death, when the loss was still immediate rather than settled into memory.

Bacon's relationship with Dyer began, on Lucian Freud's account, when Dyer broke into Bacon's flat to steal from it and Bacon, finding him a thrilling and violent presence, took him to bed rather than turning him away^[2]. Freud described Bacon as drawn to danger and to being hurt, while Dyer, by contrast, was not the aggressor the relationship needed him to be: Dyer got depressed and concerned rather than cruel, which was, in Freud's telling, exactly the wrong response for what Bacon wanted from him^[2]. That mismatch ran through the years of their relationship, and Dyer's own depression deepened until it ended in his suicide in Paris. The volatility of the relationship, real affection paired with real conflict, recurs across the many paintings Bacon made of Dyer through the 1960s and into this group made after his death.

Bacon worked almost entirely from photographs rather than live models throughout his career, relying at times on his friend John Deakin to photograph his subjects for him, alongside a personal fascination with Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies and stills from film and news photography^[3]. This method was not incidental to how he painted Dyer after his death. Because Bacon habitually built his portraits from photographic sources rather than sittings, he could keep returning to Dyer's likeness using photographs taken while Dyer was alive, a continuity of image that a painter reliant on live posing could not have managed^[2][4]. The result is a body of posthumous portraits built from the same raw material, photographs, that Bacon had always used, now put to a use he had not chosen.