Francis Bacon

Biography

In August 1998 Francis Bacon’s heir, John Edwards, and the executor of his estate, Brian Clarke, gave the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin the entire contents of his London studio at 7 Reece Mews, untouched since 1992. Archaeologists, art historians and conservators mapped more than seven thousand items and rebuilt the studio, with its doors, floor, walls and ceiling. Among those items are fifteen hundred photographs, a hundred slashed canvases and thirteen hundred pages torn from books. In 2001 it was opened to the public.

So the studio came back to the city where Bacon was born.

He was born on 28 October 1909 in Dublin, at 63 Lower Baggot Street; at that time the whole of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. His father, Captain Edward Bacon, trained racehorses; his mother, Christina Winifred Firth, was heiress to a Sheffield steel business. The boy was brought up by a nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who stayed close to him until her death in 1951. The family moved back and forth between Ireland and England. As a child Bacon suffered badly from asthma and was allergic to horses; his schooling was patchy, with a private tutor at home and, in 1924–1926, at Dean Close, a boarding school in Cheltenham. The shy boy loved dressing up, and this angered his father. In 1926 his father threw him out of the house.

The years that followed look like drifting. His mother sent him three pounds a week in London, and he picked up work wherever he could. In 1927 he got to Berlin and saw Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” there. He then spent about a year and a half in France: he stayed with the pianist Yvonne Bocquentin near Chantilly, and at the Musée Condé he saw Poussin’s “Massacre of the Innocents”, a painting he often came back to later. In the winter of 1928/29 he returned to London and took up the design of interiors, furniture and rugs. He began painting in oil alongside the Australian artist Roy de Maistre, and Eric Hall became his patron. His “Crucifixion” (1933), partly inspired by Picasso’s “The Three Dancers”, attracted attention, but his solo exhibition of 1934 was poorly received, and the selectors of the International Surrealist Exhibition found his work insufficiently surreal. Bacon gave up painting for nearly ten years and destroyed most of his early work. In 1935 in Paris he bought a secondhand book on diseases of the mouth with hand-coloured plates of open mouths. Together with the still from “Potemkin” in which a wounded nurse screams in broken pince-nez, these plates haunted him for the rest of his life.

In 1940 his father died. The army would not take Bacon because of his asthma; he volunteered for the civil defence rescue service, but the same asthma soon got him discharged. In 1943, together with Hall, he took the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place in South Kensington, the former studio of John Everett Millais, and set up his studio in the old billiard room.

It was there, in 1944, that “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” appeared: three half-animal creatures against a bright orange ground, grown out of the image of the Furies, the goddesses of vengeance. In April 1945 they were shown at the Lefevre Gallery and caused a sensation. Bacon himself regarded the triptych as his first mature work and did not want anything painted earlier to be exhibited.

“Painting” (1946), by his own account, came about by accident: he had started on a bird alighting on a field, and the line led him somewhere else. In 1948 Alfred Barr bought it for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With the proceeds of the sale Bacon left for Monte Carlo, where he spent whole days in the casino. In debt and unable to buy new canvases, he began painting on the raw, unprimed reverse of old ones. He kept the habit for the rest of his life.

In 1949 his first solo exhibition was held at the Hanover Gallery in London. In the “Heads” series shown there was “Head VI”, his first engagement with Velázquez’s “Portrait of Innocent X”. He kept returning to that portrait until the early 1960s, painting about forty popes, yet he saw the original only once, late in life. One of the finest of the popes is considered to be “Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X” (1953): the mouth is open in a scream that the heavy, dark curtains muffle. Bacon did not paint from life; he found it easier to work from photographs, alone. He used pictures by John Deakin, a photographer for Vogue, and Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotographs. His evenings were spent in Soho, at Muriel Belcher’s Colony Room club; he and Lucian Freud, in Freud’s words, saw each other almost every day for some twenty-five years, until they fell out in the 1970s.

In 1961 Bacon moved to 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington and lived there until the end. In his first months there he painted his first large triptych, “Three Studies for a Crucifixion” (1962), and in May 1962 the Tate held a retrospective. In 1963 he met George Dyer. It is often said that Dyer broke into his house as a burglar; in fact they seem to have met in a pub. From the mid-1960s Bacon painted mainly portraits of friends, and Dyer became his principal model. In October 1971, two days before the opening of a major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, Dyer died in a hotel room. Bacon opened the exhibition. In 1972–1973 came the three “Black Triptychs”, which show the minutes before and after Dyer’s death, and more and more self-portraits: there was no one left to paint, he said. To my mind, “Study for Self-Portrait” (1982) and “Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych” (1985–1986) are the most honest things he painted about old age.

From 1974 John Edwards, a barman from Soho, was at his side; he became almost a son to him and later his sole heir. At the beginning of 1992, against his doctors’ advice, Bacon travelled to Spain. He died on 28 April 1992 in Madrid. There was no memorial service; the body was cremated and the ashes scattered.