Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 in Dublin, Ireland, the second of five children of English parents and moved to London in 1926, his emerging homosexuality having severely strained relations with his parents. Ostensibly self-taught, by the 1950s he had become one of the most acclaimed British painters of the twentieth century, with a roster of exhibitions worldwide in his lifetime and posthumously. His expressionist work is held in numerous UK public collections, including the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and Tate, London.
Painter Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 in Dublin, Ireland, the second of five children of English parents. During the First World War the family moved to London, where Bacon’s father served in the War Office, before returning to Ireland. Between 1924 and 1926 Bacon boarded at Dean Close School, Cheltenham. His emerging homosexuality severely strained relations with his parents and, by his own account, he was expelled from the household, moving to London in 1926. The following spring, he accompanied a family friend to Berlin - an overwhelming cultural experience. Equally important were the subsequent months Bacon spent in Paris, where, in summer 1927, at Galerie Pierre Rosenberg, he discovered Picasso's recent drawings. As a result, Bacon began making drawings and watercolours himself, apparently without formal guidance.
In 1928, he returned to London, working as an interior decorator and furniture designer at 17 Queensberry Mews West, South Kensington. Stylistically influenced by Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray, by August 1930, Bacon had caught the attention of The Studio magazine, which presented his designs as examples of the ‘1930 Look in British Decoration’. Later that year Bacon exhibited paintings and rugs at his studio. In 1933 he participated in a group show at the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street and his Crucifixion (1933) was reproduced in Herbert Read’s Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern painting and Sculpture (1933) and purchased by noted collector, Sir Michel Sadler. Bacon's one-man show of paintings, gouaches and drawings at the Transition Gallery in February 1934 sold poorly, however, and in 1936 his work was rejected by the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, deemed ‘insufficiently surreal’. Despite his inclusion in an exhibition of ten Young British Painters, organised by Eric Hall at Thos. Agnew's and Sons in January 1937, scarcely any work survives from this period. Bacon’s asthma meant that he was declared unfit for active service in the Second World War, though he volunteered in Air Raid Precautions (ARP). In 1943 he moved into the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, a house once owned by Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. There he painted Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), subsequently included in a group exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945 and bought by Eric Hall, who later presented it to the Tate Gallery. In 1949 Bacon held a solo show at the Hanover Gallery, which included full-length figures and a series of tormented heads, culminating in Head VI (1949). A half-length portrait, this was the first painting in Bacon's most celebrated series (from 1949), showing a boxed, screaming pope, which established his international reputation. A variation on Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), Bacon was also inspired by a still of the screaming nurse from Eisenstein’s film, Battleship Potemkin (1925). In the early 1950s Bacon followed his lover, Peter Lacy to Morocco, dividing his time between Tangier and London, where his circle ranged from Soho luminaries, such as Muriel Belcher, John Deakin, and painters, John Minton, Michael Andrews, and Frank Auerbach, to the literary salons of Ann Fleming and Sonia Orwell.
Bacon's international reputation increased and, in 1953, he held his first New York exhibition at Durlacher Bros. In1954 he exhibited with Ben Nicholson and Lucian Freud in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and, in 1955, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (ICA) held his first retrospective. He signed a contract in October 1958 with Marlborough Fine Art after its directors agreed to take on his considerable debt of £1,242 owed to the Hanover Gallery. In 1961, he occupied 7 Reece Mews, a converted coach house in South Kensington, where he produced his first large-scale triptych, Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) which featured, along with 90 other works, in a major retrospective at the Tate Gallery in May 1962. The triptych format allowed Bacon to show his figures to be, simultaneously, time-related and separated. Mainly through the medium of John Deakin’s photographs, several of these figures were based on Bacon's partner, George Dyer, with whom he became involved in 1963. Photography itself became an indispensable means to Bacon’s expressive ends. Deakin’s photographs of other close friends, Isabel Rawsthorne, Lucian Freud and Muriel Belcher, allowed Bacon to capture the vitality of his subjects, while keeping a critical distance. In October 1971 the Grand Palais, Paris staged a major retrospective. However, the event was marred by tragedy: on the eve of the opening, Dyer, committed suicide in their Paris hotel room. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition in 1975 was the first time showing works by a contemporary British artist. In the same year David Sylvester's immensely revealing interviews with Bacon were published, affording the artist an unusual degree of influence over the reception and discussion of his works. In 1985 the Tate Gallery held its second Bacon retrospective accompanied by the director’s statement that Bacon was the ‘greatest living painter’.
Francis Bacon died on 28 April 1992 in Madrid, Spain. The studio, where he worked for over 30 years, was donated by his heir, John Edwards, to the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin in 1998, where it was reconstructed and opened to the public in 2001. Bacon’s work is held in numerous UK public collections, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art and Tate.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Francis Bacon]
Publications related to [Francis Bacon] in the Ben Uri Library