Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures.
He said that he saw images "in series", and his work, which numbers in the region of 590 extant paintings along with many others he destroyed,Harrison, Martin. "Out of the Black Cavern". Christie's. Retrieved 4 November 2018 Archived on 11 November 2019. typically focused on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His output can be broadly described as sequences or variations on single motifs; including the 1930s Picasso-influenced bio-morphs and Furies, the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures, the 1950s "screaming popes", the mid-to-late-1950s animals and lone figures, the early-1960s crucifixions, the mid-to-late-1960s portraits of friends, the 1970s self-portraits, and the cooler, more technical 1980s paintings.
Bacon did not begin to seriously focus on painting until his late twenties, having drifted in the late 1920s and early 1930s as an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler.Schmied (1996), 121. He said that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. From the mid-1960s, he mainly produced portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single, diptych or triptych panels. Following the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971 (memorialised in his Black Triptychs, and a number of posthumous portraits), his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death. The climax of his later period is marked by the masterpieces Study for Self-Portrait (1982) and Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86.
Despite his existentialist and bleak outlook, Bacon was charismatic, articulate and well read. A bon vivant, he spent his middle age eating, drinking and gambling in London's Soho with like-minded friends including Lucian Freud (although they fell out in the mid-1970s, for reasons neither ever explained), John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Daniel Farson, Tom Baker and Jeffrey Bernard. After Dyer's suicide, he largely distanced himself from this circle, and while still socially active and his passion for gambling and drinking continued, he settled into a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards. Since his death, Bacon's reputation has grown steadily, and his work is among the most acclaimed, expensive and sought-after on the art market. In the late 1990s, a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed,Some had appeared in black-and-white photographs in the late 1950s Catalogue Raisonné. including early 1950s pope paintings and 1960s portraits, re-emerged to set record prices at auction.
Biography Early life Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 in 63 Lower Baggot Street in Dublin. At that time, all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. His father, Army Captain Anthony Edward "Eddy" Mortimer Bacon, was born in Adelaide, South Australia, to an English father and an Australian mother. Eddy was a veteran of the Second Boer War, a racehorse trainer, and the grandson of Major-General Anthony Bacon, who claimed descent from Sir Nicholas Bacon, elder half-brother of Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, who is better known as Sir Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher, and essayist.Peppiatt (1996), 4. Bacon's mother, Christina Winifred "Winnie" Firth, was heiress to a Sheffield steel business and coal mine. He had an older brother, Harley, two younger sisters, Ianthe and Winifred, and a younger brother, Edward.
Bacon was raised by the family nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, from Cornwall, known as "Nanny Lightfoot", a maternal figure who remained close to him until her death.Hopkin, Alannah. "Book review: Portrait of Bacon in a different light". Irish Examiner, 22 June 2024. Retrieved 1 December 2024 During the early 1940s, he rented the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, John Everett Millais's old studio. Lightfoot helped him install an illicit roulette wheel there, organised by Bacon and his friends.Higgins, Charlotte (22 November 2009). "Sado-masochism and stolen shoe polish: Bacon's legacy revisited". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 June 2022. It is believed by art critics that Bacon's interest in a working-class perspective developed due to his relationship with Nanny Lightfoot.
The family moved between Ireland and England several times, leading to a sense of displacement which remained with Bacon throughout his life. They lived in Cannycourt House in County Kildare from 1911, later moving to Westbourne Terrace in London, close to where Bacon's father worked at the Territorial Force Records Office. They returned to Ireland after the First World War. Bacon lived with his maternal grandmother and step-grandfather, Winifred and Kerry Supple, at Farmleigh, Abbeyleix, County Laois, although the rest of the family again moved to Straffan Lodge near Naas, County Kildare.
Bacon was a shy child and enjoyed dressing up. This, and his effeminate manner, angered his father. A story emerged in 1992 of his father having had Bacon horsewhipped by their grooms."I was told by a homosexual friend of Francis' that he'd once admitted that his father, the dreaded and failed horse trainer, had arranged that his small son spend his childhood being systematically and viciously horsewhipped by his Irish grooms", Caroline Blackwood, "Francis Bacon (1909–1992)", The New York Review of Books, Volume 39, No. 15, 24 September 1992. He was often ill as a child, suffering from asthma and an allergy to horses. His poor health meant his formal education was sporadic; he received lessons at home from a private tutor, and from 1924 to 1926 attended Dean Close, a boarding school in Cheltenham. At a fancy-dress party at the family home, Bacon dressed as a flapper with an Eton crop, beaded dress, lipstick, high heels, and a long cigarette holder. Later that year, Bacon was thrown out of Straffan Lodge following an incident in which his father found him admiring himself in front of a large mirror wearing his mother's underwear.
London, Berlin and Paris Bacon spent the latter half of 1926 in London, on an allowance of £3 a week from his mother's trust fund, reading Friedrich Nietzsche. He found that by avoiding rent and engaging in petty theft, he could survive. To supplement his income, he briefly tried his hand at domestic service, but although he enjoyed cooking, he became bored and resigned. He was sacked from a telephone-answering position at a shop selling women's clothes in Poland Street in Soho after writing a poison pen letter to the owner.
Bacon found himself drifting through London's homosexual underworld, aware that he was able to attract a certain type of rich man, something he was quick to take advantage of, having developed a taste for good food and wine. One was a relative of Winnie Harcourt-Smith, another breeder of racehorses, who was renowned for his manliness. Bacon claimed his father had asked this "uncle" to take him 'in-hand' and 'make a man of him'. Bacon had a difficult relationship with his father, once admitting to being sexually attracted to him. He moved to Berlin in 1927, where he saw Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, both later to be influences on his work. He spent two months in Berlin, though Harcourt-Smith left after one: "He soon got tired of me, of course, and went off with a woman ... I didn't really know what to do, so I hung on for a while."
Bacon, then 17, spent the next year and a half in Paris. He met Yvonne Bocquentin, pianist and connoisseur, at the opening of an exhibition. Aware of his own need to learn French, Bacon lived for three months with Madame Bocquentin and her family at their house near Chantilly, Oise. He travelled into Paris to visit the city's art galleries.Peppiatt (1996), 32. At the Château de Chantilly (Musée Condé) he saw Nicolas Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents, a painting which he often referred to in his later work.
Bacon moved back to London in the winter of 1928/29 to work as an interior designer. He took a studio at 17 Queensberry Mews West, South Kensington, sharing the upper floor with Eric Allden—his first collector—and his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. In 1929, he met Eric Hall, his patron and lover in an often torturous and abusive relationship. Bacon left the Queensberry Mews West studio in 1931 and had no settled space for some years. He probably shared a studio with Roy De Maistre circa 1931/32 in Chelsea."Roy De Maistre 1894 - 1968". Estate of Francis Bacon. Retrieved 30 January 2022.
Designer of furniture and rugs
Crucifixion (1933) was his first painting to attract public attention, and was in part based on Pablo Picasso's The Three Dancers of 1925. When not well received, Bacon became disillusioned and abandoned painting for nearly a decade and attempted to destroy or suppress his earlier works.Peppiatt, Michael. Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. He visited Paris in 1935 where he bought a secondhand book on anatomical diseases of the mouth containing high-quality hand-coloured plates of both open mouths and oral interiors, which haunted and obsessed him for the remainder of his life. These and the scene with the nurse screaming on the Odessa steps from the Battleship Potemkin later became recurrent parts of Bacon's iconography, with the angularity of Eisenstein's images often combined with the thick red palette of his recently purchased medical tome.
In the winter of 1935–36, Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, making a first selection for the International Surrealist Exhibition, visited his studio at 71 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, saw "three or four large canvases including one with a grandfather clock", but found his work "insufficiently surreal to be included in the show". Bacon claimed Penrose told him "Mr. Bacon, don't you realise a lot has happened in painting since the Impressionists?" In 1936 or 1937 Bacon moved from 71 Royal Hospital Road to the top floor of 1 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which Eric Hall had rented. Bacon exhibited in a group show in January 1937 at Thomas Agnew and Sons, 43 Old Bond Street, London, titled Young British Painters, which included Graham Sutherland and Roy De Maistre. Eric Hall organised the show. He showed four works: Figures in a Garden (1936); Abstraction; Abstraction from the Human Form (known from magazine photographs); and Seated Figure (also lost). These paintings prefigure Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) in alternatively representing a tripod structure (Abstraction), bared teeth (Abstraction from the Human Form), and both being biomorphic in form.