Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon: Painter of the Human Scream

He did not attend art school, never served an apprenticeship, and did not take painting seriously until his late twenties. Yet the man who wandered out of Dublin's Georgian squares into London's Soho underworld became, in the words of critic John Russell, a dividing line in British art itself: "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one... can confuse the two."

A Childhood Built on Estrangement

Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, the son of Captain Anthony Edward "Eddy" Mortimer Bacon, an Australian-born army veteran and racehorse trainer, and Christina Winifred Firth, heiress to a Sheffield steel and coal fortune. He was raised largely by his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot of Cornwall, who remained his closest companion for decades. A sickly, effeminate boy plagued by asthma and an allergy to horses, he clashed constantly with his authoritarian father, who was disturbed by his son's emerging homosexuality. Schooling was fitful — a stint at Dean Close from 1924 to 1926 was as close as Bacon came to formal education. Expelled from the family home in 1926, he drifted through London's queer underworld on a small allowance before decamping to Berlin in 1927 and then Paris. In Berlin he absorbed Fritz Lang's *Metropolis* and Sergei Eisenstein's *Battleship Potemkin*; in Paris he stood before Nicolas Poussin's *Massacre of the Innocents* at the Château de Chantilly, an image that would recur in his work for the rest of his life.

The Long Delay

Bacon's road to painting ran through interior decoration, gambling dens, and bohemian idling rather than any studio system. What tipped him toward canvas was witnessing an exhibition of Picasso's biomorphic figures at Paul Rosenberg's Paris gallery in the late 1920s, which he later said revealed to him the sheer "possibilities of painting." His first picture to draw notice, *Crucifixion* (1933), leaned heavily on Picasso's *Three Dancers*; when it was poorly received, Bacon abandoned painting for nearly a decade, destroying much of what he had made. In 1935 he bought a secondhand medical textbook illustrated with hand-colored plates of diseased mouths — an image that lodged in him and never left.

1944: The Break

Everything changed with *Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion*, painted in 1944 and exhibited the following April, just as the liberation of the concentration camps was reaching the British public. The triptych fused Picasso's biomorphs, crucifixion iconography, and the shrieking Furies of Greek tragedy into something that read, instantly, as a "brutally frank and horrifically pessimistic response" to the war. It was less a picture than a verdict on the century, and it made Bacon's reputation overnight at the age of thirty-four — astonishingly late for an artist with no formal training.

Popes, Screams, and Cages

Through the following decades Bacon returned obsessively to a small set of motifs, working them like a jazz musician worrying a phrase. Velázquez's 1650 *Portrait of Innocent X* became the seed of his Pope series; Bacon stripped the image of its hierarchical calm and replaced it with an alienated figure trapped mid-scream, most famously in *Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X* (1953). The screaming mouth itself — borrowed from the medical textbook, from Grünewald's tortured Christs, and from the nurse shot on the Odessa Steps in *Battleship Potemkin* — became so central to his art that biographer Michael Peppiatt argued understanding its origins would be tantamount to understanding "the whole art of Francis Bacon." Bacon also confined his figures inside thin geometric cages and cubic frameworks, a device he used, in his own words, to "concentrate the image down" and heighten psychological pressure rather than to illustrate a story. He worked serially and in multi-panel formats — triptychs and diptychs — treating each image as one frame in a sequence, an approach he sustained from the biomorphic Furies of the 1930s through the cooler, more technical triptychs of his final decade.

Lacy, Dyer, and the Black Triptychs

Bacon's private life fed directly into his canvases. In 1952 he began a violent, sadomasochistic relationship with Peter Lacy, an alcoholic pianist he later called the love of his life; Lacy died in 1962. In 1963 Bacon met George Dyer, a younger man from London's East End, in a Soho pub, and for the first time took the dominant role in a relationship, acting as protector and father figure. Dyer sat for numerous portraits but felt increasingly shut out of Bacon's sophisticated social world. In October 1971, on the eve of Bacon's career-defining retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris — where he was hailed as Britain's "greatest living painter" — Dyer died of a barbiturate overdose in their shared hotel room. Bacon stood through his own triumph in outward composure, then collapsed afterward, producing a run of single-canvas Dyer portraits and the harrowing "Black Triptychs" that replayed the hours around the death. He told friends that "daemons, disaster and loss" now stalked him like the Furies of his earliest paintings.

Alongside this, Bacon lived as a fixture of Soho's Colony Room, the private drinking club run by Muriel Belcher, where he ate, drank, and gambled in the company of Lucian Freud, John Minton, Frank Auerbach, the photographer John Deakin, and the critic David Sylvester, whom he met in 1950 and who conducted the extended interviews that remain the primary record of Bacon's own account of his working method.

Chance, Not Confession

Bacon insisted he was not painting self-expression but constructing systems that could "trap the fact" of sensation. "All painting," he said, "is accident." He worked with unusually large brushes and let paint behave unpredictably, treating the resulting distortions as material to select from rather than errors to correct — a deliberate courting of chance he believed preserved a rawness that careful draftsmanship would kill.

Why Francis Is Called a Genius

Bacon's claim to genius rests on invention rather than intellect in the academic sense — with no formal training, he built an entirely new vocabulary for the human body in extremity, fusing old-master composition (Velázquez, Grünewald, Rembrandt) with photographic distortion (Muybridge's chronophotography, medical X-rays) and modernist cinema. Critics have used the word without hedging: John Russell treated 1944 as a literal fracture point in English painting, and later artists echoed the claim — Damien Hirst said Bacon's canvases evoke "spaces I'd imagined in nightmares," Tracey Emin praised his "maverick" chaos. The case is really about original seeing: Bacon made the cage, the scream, and the accident-prone brushstroke carry philosophical weight about suffering that no contemporary matched. The honest counter-case is that Bacon resisted the label of "expressing" anything at all, and some critics find the repetition of his motifs — screaming popes, caged men, worked over five decades — closer to a powerful private obsession than to expanding intellectual range. What is not in dispute is the market's verdict: his 2013 triptych *Three Studies of Lucian Freud* sold for $142.4 million, then the highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction.

Legacy

Bacon died of a heart attack in Madrid on 28 April 1992, at eighty-two, while on holiday, his chronic asthma having become severe respiratory disease. He left his roughly £11 million estate to his companion John Edwards, who — with the artist Brian Clarke — donated the entire contents of Bacon's chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews to Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery in 1998; it was reconstructed and opened to the public in 2001, cataloguing some 7,000 items. A five-volume catalogue raisonné by Martin Harrison, published in 2016, documents 584 paintings. Decades after his death, Bacon remains one of the most expensive and most exhibited painters of the twentieth century, the artist most credited with keeping the human figure — screaming, caged, dissolving — at the center of painting when the rest of his era had turned to abstraction.

Achievements

• Notable work: Triptych, 1976
• Worked as painter, designer and visual artist