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.

Influences

Bacon was largely self-taught as an artist. His influences included:

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• Pablo Picasso, in particular the biomorphic figures in Picasso's paintings of bathers at Dinard of 1927-32.
• Diego Velázquez, Velázquez?s portrait of Pope Innocent X (1649?50). "that Velázquez is one of the great paintings of the world, of course - well, I was very obsessed with that Velázquez and, of course, I made a great mistake…" Bacon painted several versions of it, of which Figure with Meat (1954) is an atypically Grand Guignol example. Bacon did not see the original Velázquez until 1990.
• Vincent van Gogh, van Gogh?s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (July 1888).
• Rembrandt Self-portrait (Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence)
• Chaim Soutine
• John Constable - the full size oil-sketch for The Leaping Horse at the V&A.
• Titian Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto (c.1551-1562)
• the drawings of Michelangelo
• Henri Matisse Bathers by a River (1909-16), Although Bacon said that "He doesn't have Picasso's 'Brutality of Fact'" (Interviews with Francis Bacon), David Sylvester has convincingly argued in his essay Bacon and Matisse(1996) for Matisse's pervasive influence on Bacon's painting.
• Pharonic Egyptian sculpture of the Eighteenth dynasty, from the rule of Amenophis III and Amenophis IV especially.
• Masaccio Trinity c.1424-1428 Santa Maria Novella (Bacon greatly admired Masaccio and similarities between the composition of Trinity and Painting (1946) have been noted).
• Marcel Duchamp
• Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx (1826-1827), Le Bain Turc (1859-1863)
• Edgar Degas After the Bath, Woman drying herself (1888-1892), Beach Scene (1868-1877) (Both in the collection of the National Gallery, London.)
• Walter Sickert Granby Street (1912-1913)
• Henri Michaux
• Georges-Pierre Seurat
• Cimabue "You know the great Cimabue Crucifixion? I always think of that as an image - as a worm crawling down the cross."
• Alberto Giacometti drawings
• Matthias Grünewald Isenheim Altarpiece
• Julia Margaret Cameron
• Eadweard Muybridge The Human Figure in Motion, Animals in Motion
• Étienne-Jules Marey
• Nadar
• John Deakin
• Luis Buñuel. "I've been very influenced by the films of Buñuel, especially Un Chien Andalou because I think that Buñuel had a remarkable precision of imagery. I can't say how they have directly effected me but they certainly have affected my whole attitude to visual things - in the acuteness of the visual image which you've got to make."
• Sergei Eisenstein. Strike (1925) and The Battleship Potemkin (1925), especially the famous scene on the Odessa Steps.

Bacon also drew inspiration from the poems of T. S. Eliot, Pound and Yeats; the plays of Aeschylus and Shakespeare; Proust and the Joyce of Ulysses.

Related Topics:
T. S. Eliot - Pound - Yeats - Aeschylus - Shakespeare - Proust - Joyce - Ulysses

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