Francis Bacon drifted as a decorator and gambler before painting seriously in his late twenties
For several years either side of 1930, Francis Bacon drifted between designing interiors, gambling and living the high life, and only turned seriously to painting in his late twenties. He blamed the delay on hunting too long for a subject worth his attention. When it came, in a 1944 crucifixion triptych, it made his name.
He was born in Dublin on 28 October 1909, when all of Ireland belonged to the United Kingdom. His father, an Australian-born army captain and racehorse trainer, claimed descent from the family of the Elizabethan philosopher of the same name. Asthma and an allergy to horses kept the boy sickly and his schooling patchy, and the family's repeated moves between Ireland and England left him feeling permanently displaced. After his father caught him wearing his mother's underwear, he was thrown out of the house.
In London in 1926 he lived on £3 a week from his mother's trust fund, reading Nietzsche, dodging rent and stealing small things. Through it all his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, stayed close; in the 1940s she even helped him set up an illicit roulette wheel in his rented South Kensington studio, once the workplace of John Everett Millais.
Bacon said he saw images in series, and roughly 590 of his paintings survive, besides many he destroyed. He worked through long runs on single motifs: screaming popes in the 1950s, crucifixions in the early 1960s, portraits of friends and drinking companions later that decade, often as diptychs or triptychs. In Soho his circle included Lucian Freud, until the two fell out in the mid-1970s for reasons neither explained.
The suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971 darkened the work further, prompting the Black Triptychs and a fixation on time and death that peaked in Study for Self-Portrait of 1982. He died on 28 April 1992. Since then his standing has only climbed, and pope paintings once thought destroyed resurfaced in the late 1990s to set auction records.
Source: Francis Bacon (artist)
