Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was a British painter born in Dublin, self-taught after a spell as an interior decorator. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) made his name in 1945. He said, “I am a very optimistic person,” and “I would like to celebrate life, and I always think I do.” The oils are how he meant it.

Before turning to painting, he worked as an interior decorator. The convinced autodidact dealt intensively with the history of art; works of Expressionism, Surrealism, Romanticism, the late Goya, Michelangelo and Rembrandt are all reflected in his work. Photographs, such as Muybridge’s movement studies, images of athletes, friends, lovers or himself, are also incorporated into his human studies.

His breakthrough came in 1945 when Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) won him almost instant notoriety. His mature style emerged completely with the series known as The Screaming Popes (1949–mid-1950s), in which he converted Diego Velázquez’s famous Portrait of Pope Innocent X into a new icon of the scream — still, he insisted, a way to celebrate life. Many of his paintings depict isolated figures, often framed by geometric constructions, and rendered in smeared, violent colours. He was admired for his skill in using oils, whose fluidity and mysteries he exploits; later portraits use lighter colours and push the face and body into extreme distortion, still in search of vitality.

His work is owned by major museums around the world, and he has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions. His studio was acquired by the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it has been recreated as a room for visitors to view. In 2013, Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s in New York — then an auction record.