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. Bacon's mother, Christina Winifred "Winnie" Firth, was heiress to a
Sheffield steel business and coal mine. He had an older brother, Harley, 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. It is believed by art critics that Bacon's interest in a working-class perspective developed due to his relationship with Nanny Lightfoot. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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 and Hall took the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, formerly the house and studio of
John Everett Millais, in 1943. High-vaulted and north-lit, its roof was recently bombed—Bacon was able to adapt a large old
billiard room at the back as his studio. Lightfoot, lacking an alternative location, slept on the kitchen table. They held illicit
roulette parties, organised by Bacon with the assistance of Hall.
Early success By 1944 Bacon had gained confidence and moved toward developing his unique signature style. His
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion had summarised themes explored in his earlier paintings, including his examination of Picasso's
biomorphs, his interpretations of the
Crucifixion, and the Greek Furies. It is generally considered his first mature piece; he regarded his works before the triptych as irrelevant. The painting caused a sensation when exhibited in 1945 and established him as a foremost post-war painter. Remarking on the cultural significance of
Three Studies,
John Russell observed in 1971 that "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one ... can confuse the two."
Painting 1946 was shown in several group shows including in the British section of ''Exposition internationale d'art moderne'' (18 November – 28 December 1946) at the
Musée National d'Art Moderne, for which Bacon travelled to Paris. Within a fortnight of the sale of
Painting (1946) to the
Hanover Gallery, Bacon used the proceeds to decamp from London to
Monte Carlo. After staying at a succession of hotels and flats, including the Hôtel de Ré, Bacon settled in a large villa, La Frontalière, in the hills above the town. Hall and Lightfoot would come to stay. Bacon spent much of the next few years in Monte Carlo apart from short visits to London. From Monte Carlo, Bacon wrote to Sutherland and
Erica Brausen. His letters to Brausen show he painted there, but no paintings are known to survive. Bacon said he became "obsessed" with the
Casino de Monte Carlo, where he would "spend whole days". Falling in debt from gambling, he was unable to afford a new canvas. This compelled him to paint on the raw, unprimed side of his previous work, a practice he kept throughout his life. In 1948,
Painting (1946) sold to
Alfred Barr for the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York for £240. At least one visit to Paris in 1946 brought Bacon into contact with French postwar painting and Left Bank ideas such as
Existentialism. He had, by this time, embarked on his lifelong friendship with
Isabel Rawsthorne, a painter closely involved with
Giacometti and the Left Bank set. They shared many interests, including ethnography and classical literature.
Late 1940s In 1947, Sutherland introduced Bacon to Brausen, who represented Bacon for 12 years. Despite this, Bacon did not mount a one-man show in Brausen's Hanover Gallery until 1949. Bacon returned to London and Cromwell Place late in 1948. The following year Bacon exhibited his "Heads" series, most notable for
Head VI, Bacon's first surviving engagement with Velázquez's
Portrait of Pope Innocent X (three 'popes' were painted in Monte Carlo in 1946 but were destroyed). He kept an extensive inventory of images for source material, but preferred not to confront the major works in person; he viewed
Portrait of Innocent X only once, much later in his life.
1950s '', 1963 Bacon's main haunt was
The Colony Room, a private drinking club at 41
Dean Street in Soho, known as "Muriel's" after
Muriel Belcher, its proprietor. Belcher had run the Music-box club in
Leicester Square during the war, and secured a 3–11 p.m. drinking licence for the Colony Room bar as a private-members club. Bacon was an early member, joining the day after its opening in 1948. He was 'adopted' by Belcher as a 'daughter', and allowed free drinks and £10 a week to bring in friends and rich patrons. In 1948 he met
John Minton, a regular at Muriel's, as were the painters
Lucian Freud,
Frank Auerbach,
Patrick Swift and the
Vogue photographer
John Deakin. In 1950, Bacon met the art critic
David Sylvester, then best known for his writing on
Henry Moore and
Alberto Giacometti. Sylvester had admired and written about Bacon since 1948. Bacon's artistic inclinations in the 1950s moved towards his abstracted figures which were typically isolated in geometrical cage-like spaces, and set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work typically focused more on a single subject for sustained periods, often in
triptych or
diptych formats. Although his decisions might have been driven by the fact that in the 1950s he tended to produce group works for specific showings, usually leaving things until the last minute, there is a significant development in his aesthetic choices during this period which influenced his preference for the represented content in his paintings. On 30 April 1951, Jessie Lightfoot, his childhood nanny, died at Cromwell Place; Bacon was gambling in
Nice when he learned of her death. She had been his closest companion, joining him in London on his return from Paris, and lived with him and Eric Alden at Queensberry Mews West, and later with Eric Hall near Petersfield, in Monte Carlo and at Cromwell Place. Stricken, Bacon sold the 7 Cromwell Place apartment. In 1952, Bacon met Peter Lacy, a pianist and former RAF pilot from a similar social background to himself. Lacy was a violent alcoholic who was disliked by Bacon's contemporaries but was also described as the love of Bacon's life. The pair engaged in an off and on relationship which had a significant
sadomasochistic aspect, where Bacon would deliberately provoke acts of violence from Lacy. In the mid-1950s Lacy moved to Tangier, Morocco and Bacon also began to spend some of his time there. In 1958 he aligned with the
Marlborough Fine Art gallery, who remained as his sole dealer until 1992. In return for a ten-year contract, Marlborough advanced him money against current and future paintings, with the price of each determined by its size. A painting measuring 20 inches by 24 inches was valued at £165 ($462), while one of 65 inches by 78 inches was valued at £420 ($1,176); these were sizes Bacon favoured. According to the contract, the painter would try to supply the gallery with £3,500 ($9,800) worth of pictures each year.
1960s and 1970s In 1962, Bacon's lover Peter Lacy died from the effects of alcoholism the day before Bacon opened a retrospective exhibition in the
Tate. although a much-repeated myth claims they met when Dyer burgled Bacon's flat. Dyer was about 30 years old, from London's
East End. He came from a family steeped in crime and had till then spent his life drifting between theft and prison. Bacon's earlier relationships had been with older and tumultuous men. His previous lover, Peter Lacy, had a reputation for tearing up Bacon's paintings, beating him in drunken rages, and at times leaving him on streets half-conscious. Bacon was now the dominating personality, attracted to Dyer's vulnerability and trusting nature. Dyer was impressed by Bacon's self-confidence and success, and Bacon acted as a protector and father figure to the insecure younger man. Dyer was, like Bacon, a borderline alcoholic and similarly took obsessive care with his appearance. Pale-faced and a chain-smoker, Dyer typically confronted his daily hangovers by drinking again. His compact and athletic build belied a docile and inwardly tortured personality, although the art critic
Michael Peppiatt describes him as having the air of a man who could "land a decisive punch". Their behaviours eventually overwhelmed their affair, and by 1970 Bacon was merely providing Dyer with enough money to stay more or less permanently drunk. Bacon's paintings emphasise Dyer's physicality, yet are uncharacteristically tender. More than any other of Bacon's close friends, Dyer came to feel inseparable from his portraits. The paintings gave him stature, a ''raison d'etre'', and offered meaning to what Bacon described as Dyer's "brief interlude between life and death". Many critics have described Dyer's portraits as favourites, including
Michel Leiris and Lawrence Gowing. Yet as Dyer's novelty diminished within Bacon's circle of sophisticated intellectuals, Dyer became increasingly bitter and ill at ease. Although Dyer welcomed the attention the paintings brought him, he did not pretend to understand or even like them. "All that money an' I fink they're reely 'orrible," he observed with choked pride. Dyer abandoned crime but descended into alcoholism. Bacon's money attracted hangers-on for
benders around London's Soho. Withdrawn and reserved when sober, Dyer was highly animated and aggressive when drunk, and often attempted to "pull a Bacon" by buying large rounds and paying for expensive dinners for his wide circle. Dyer's erratic behaviour inevitably wore thin with his cronies, with Bacon, and with Bacon's friends. Most of Bacon's art world associates regarded Dyer as a nuisance—an intrusion into the world of high culture to which
their Bacon belonged. Dyer reacted by becoming increasingly needy and dependent. By 1971, he was drinking alone and only in occasional contact with his former lover. In Paris, Bacon and Dyer initially shared a hotel room, but Bacon left. When he returned on the morning of 24 October, with Terry Danziger-Miles and Valerie Beston, they discovered Dyer's body. They persuaded the hotel manager not to announce the death for two days. Bacon spent the following day surrounded by people eager to meet him. In mid-evening of the following day, he was "informed" that Dyer had taken an overdose of
barbiturates and was dead. Bacon continued with the retrospective and displayed powers of self-control "to which few of us could aspire", according to Russell. Bacon was deeply affected by the loss of Dyer and had recently lost four other friends and his nanny. From this point, death haunted his life and work. Though outwardly stoic at the time, he was inwardly broken. He did not express his feelings to critics but later admitted to friends that "daemons, disaster and loss" now stalked him as if his own version of the
Eumenides (Greek for The Furies). Bacon spent the remainder of his stay in Paris attending to promotional activities and funeral arrangements. He returned to London later that week to comfort Dyer's family. During the funeral, many of Dyer's friends, including hardened East-End criminals, broke down in tears. As the coffin was lowered into the grave one friend was overcome and screamed "you bloody fool!" Bacon remained stoic during the proceedings, but in the following months suffered an emotional and physical breakdown. Deeply affected, over the following two years he painted a number of single canvas portraits of Dyer, and the three highly regarded "
Black Triptychs", each of which details moments immediately before and after Dyer's suicide.
Death While on holiday, Bacon was admitted to the private Clinica Ruber,
Madrid in 1992. His chronic
asthma, which had plagued him all his life, had developed into a more severe respiratory condition and he could not talk or breathe very well. He died of a
heart attack on 28 April 1992, aged 82. He bequeathed his estate (then valued at £11 million) to his heir and sole legatee John Edwards; in 1998, at Edwards's request,
Brian Clarke, a friend of Bacon and Edwards, was installed as sole executor of the estate by the High Court, following the Court's severing of all ties between Bacon's former gallery,
Marlborough Fine Art, and his estate. In 1998 the director of the
Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin secured Edwards's and Clarke's donation of the contents of Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews,
South Kensington. The contents of his studio were surveyed, moved, and reconstructed in the gallery. ==Themes==