Francis Bacon is well known for his depictions of wide-open, screaming or contorted mouths, which he explored as a way of saying something about the raw, violent, or animalistic aspects of human nature. Bacon was fascinated with the inside of the mouth: in a bookshop in Paris in 1935, he bought a second-hand medical textbook full of hand-coloured p... See more

In the late eighteenth century, French painter Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun caused a stir with a self-portrait that depicted her smiling with visible teeth – not very demure for a woman. Le Brun, however, revelled in breaking social and artistic conventions.