Francis Bacon (painter)

Francis Bacon (October 28, 1909 - April 28, 1992) was an Anglo-Irish painter, atheist, gambler and bon vivant. He was a collateral descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon.

Early life

Francis Bacon was born at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, Ireland to English parents - Eddy Bacon, a retired Captain in the Hussars turned horse-trainer, and Winnie Firth. He was a sickly child, suffering from asthma, and a violent allergy to dogs and horses. He was cared for by the family nurse, Jessie Lightfoot. The family moved back and forth between Dublin and London several times while he was growing up.

Related Topics:
Dublin - Ireland - English - Hussars - Asthma - Allergy - London

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In 1911 the family was at Cannycourt House near Kilcullen, County Kildare, close to the Curragh. During the Great War the family was at a house in Westbourne Terrace, near Paddington station, London, while his father worked at the Record Office of the Territorial Forces. Nanny Lightfoot would take Bacon for walks in Hyde Park. On their return to Ireland afer the Great War, Bacon was sent to live for a time with his maternal grandmother and her husband at their house called Farmleigh, near Abbeyleix, County Laois.

Related Topics:
1911 - County Kildare - The Curragh - Great War - Paddington station - Hyde Park - Abbeyleix - County Laois

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His fondness for dressing as a flapper at fancy-dress parties, disturbed his father, whose attempts to "toughen him up" by having his effeminate son horsewhipped by the grooms may have decided his masochism. By his early teens he was engaging in sodomy with the grooms. Bacon spent 18 months at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, until April 1926 - his only brush with formal education. Later that year, he was banished from the family home, Straffan Lodge, Naas, County Kildare, following an incident in which his father found him in front of a large mirror trying on his mother's underwear.

Related Topics:
Flapper - Fancy-dress parties - Effeminate - Grooms - Masochism - Sodomy - Cheltenham - 1926 - Naas - County Kildare - Mirror

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London, Berlin and Paris

Bacon was in London through the Autumn and Winter of 1926, and, with the help of an allowance of £3 a week from his mother, 'drifted'. In the early Spring of 1927 Bacon was taken by a friend of his father and a distaff uncle, Harcourt-Smith, a breeder of race-horses, to the opulent, decadent Berlin of the Weimar Republic, staying together at the Hotel Adlon. Bacon spent two months in Berlin.

Related Topics:
1927 - Distaff - Decadent - Berlin - Weimar Republic - Hotel Adlon

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Bacon spent a year and a half in Paris, staying for three months with Yvonne Bocquentin and her family at their house near Chantilly to learn the French language, and where at the Château de Chantilly (Musée Condé) he saw Nicolas Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents. From Chantilly, Bacon went to an exhibition of 106 drawings by Pablo Picasso in the Summer of 1927 at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, rue La Boëtie, Paris, that inspired him to draw and paint.

Related Topics:
Paris - Chantilly - French language - Château de Chantilly - Nicolas Poussin - Massacre of the Innocents - Pablo Picasso

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Bacon stayed at the Hôtel Delambre in Montparnasse, while in Paris. It is likely Bacon would have gone to see the epic Napoléon on release there.

Related Topics:
Montparnasse - Napoléon

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