Francis Bacon (artist)

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.

Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact."

He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.

Bacon 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, typically focused on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats.

Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 in 63 Lower Baggot Street in Dublin.

At that time, all of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom.

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.

Bacon 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.

The family 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 shy as a child and enjoyed dressing up.

This, and his effeminate manner, angered his father.

Bacon did not begin to paint until his late twenties, having drifted in the late 1920s and early 1930s as an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler.

He said that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest.

"I'm not sure Francis had a lot in common with my mother, because she didn't take much notice of his art or anything. I remember sometimes he brought home things that he'd drawn and, I don't know what my mother did with them she wasn't wildly interested in it. They were always, what we used to call 1920s ladies you know, with the cloche hat and, cigarette holder [gestures long holder]. That sort of thing. They were always drawings like that. They were very nice. What happened to them I don't know. – And, funnily enough I actually remember them."

- Ianthe Knott (née Bacon) interviewed for Bacon's Arena, dir.

In 1924, shortly after the establishment of the Irish Free State, his parents moved to Gloucestershire, first to Prescott House in Gotherington, then Linton Hall near the border with Herefordshire.

At a fancy-dress party at the Firth family home, Cavendish Hall in Suffolk, Bacon dressed as a flapper with an Eton crop, beaded dress, lipstick, high heels, and a long cigarette holder.

In 1926, the family moved back to Straffan Lodge.

His sister, Ianthe, twelve years his junior, recalled that Bacon made drawings of ladies with cloche hats and long cigarette holders.

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.

During the early 1940s, he rented the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, John Everett Millais' old studio.

Nanny Lightfoot helped him install an illicit roulette wheel there, organised by Bacon and his friends.

The family moved house often between Ireland and England several times, leading to a sense of displacement which remained with Bacon throughout his life.

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.

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.

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.

In the late 1990s a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed, including early 1950s pope paintings and 1960s portraits, re-emerged to set record prices at auction.

A story emerged in 1992 of his father having had Bacon horsewhipped by their grooms.

Adam Low, broadcast 19 March 2005 at 9 pm on BBC2