Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (1909–1992) was one of the most important British painters of the twentieth century. Known for his intensely worked figurative paintings, portraits and studies of the human body, he drew on sources ranging from Velázquez, Rembrandt and Van Gogh to photography, film stills, medical imagery and newspaper reproductions.

Born in Dublin, Bacon spent periods in Berlin and Paris before settling permanently in London in 1928. Largely self-taught as a painter, he initially worked as a furniture and interior designer. His decisive breakthrough came with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, painted in 1944 and exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery the following year.

Bacon’s early career has an important connection with The Redfern Gallery. In 1946 the German-born dealer Erica Brausen was working at the Redfern when, at the urging of Graham Sutherland, she visited Bacon’s studio and encountered the newly completed Painting 1946. Brausen immediately bought the work, and it made its public debut in The Redfern Gallery’s Summer Exhibition in July that year. The painting, which Bacon himself regarded as a defining work in his career, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1948. The Redfern’s own history records Brausen’s discovery of the painting while working at the gallery and its subsequent exhibition there.

Brausen left the Redfern in 1947 to establish the Hanover Gallery, where she continued to represent Bacon and played a central role in establishing his international reputation. The Redfern nevertheless remained part of Bacon’s artistic world. Through Brausen the gallery acquired further works by him, and Bacon visited the Redfern in the early 1950s to study paintings by Chaïm Soutine, whose Céret landscapes were a significant influence on his developing use of colour and paint. The gallery itself records that Bacon, like Frank Auerbach, came specifically to see Soutine’s work there.

Bacon’s paintings increasingly concentrated on the isolated human figure, portraits and recurring subjects including popes, seated men, crouching nudes and animals. He frequently worked from photographs rather than from life and repeatedly transformed images drawn from art history and popular visual culture. His portraits of friends and contemporaries, including Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer, became central to his later work.

His international reputation grew rapidly during the 1950s. In 1954 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale alongside Lucian Freud and Ben Nicholson, and major retrospectives followed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1955, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1963 and the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971.

Bacon’s work is held in major public collections throughout the world, including Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and numerous national and international museums.