Francis Bacon

Anatomy Of An Enigma

Michael Peppiatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429711107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book, a biography on Francis Bacon, is inspired by the friendship the author had with Bacon and based on records of the conversations that took place since 1963. The book forms the first comprehensive account of the artist's life and his work.

Part One
1909–44

1
Origins and Upbringing 1909-26

No mind can engender till divided into two.

W. B. Yeats

Even though he did not often mention his childhood, Francis Bacon acknowledged that it had been central to his whole development. 'I think artists stay much closer to their childhood than other people,' he told me on several occasions. 'They remain far more constant to those early sensations. Other people change completely, but artists tend to stay the way they have been from the beginning.' When talking amongst friends, the picture he gave of his earliest years and his family was extremely sketchy, but what came inevitably to the fore was his parents' lack of affection for him, and his own natural waywardness. The episodes which he chose to recount were usually accompanied by a manic laughter that invited his listeners to share his hilarity, as if the whole point of his childhood and his upbringing lay in their absurdity.

But a distinct underlying bitterness could be heard at times, with resentment welling up at particular memories. The dominant impression Bacon conveyed was that he had been ill-starred from the start by being born into a family which took no interest in him, and a social class in which he felt himself to be an outsider. This unhappy family life was to some extent tempered by its backdrop; and later on, although he was never to return there, Bacon would always speak with affection and admiration about Ireland and the Irish.

Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 in a nursing home in the heart of old Georgian Dublin, at 63 Lower Baggot Street. His parents, Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon – known as Eddy – and Christina Winifred Loxley Firth – known as Winnie – already had one son, Harley, born four years previously; later two daughters, Ianthe and Winifred, and one further son, Edward, were born to them. Both parents were English by origin and had no Irish blood. Eddy Bacon had been born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1870 to an English father, Edward Bacon, formerly a Captain in the Hussars, and an Australian mother, Alice Lawrence. The family returned to England not long after Eddy's birth and lived in the manor house at Eywood, Herefordshire, which had belonged to the family of the Earl of Oxford. Edward, Francis's paternal grandfather, was appointed a Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant of the county; he listed his occupation as 'resident landowner', maintaining a household of five children and seven servants.

Bacon's family on his father's side did not lack distinguished forebears. Ever since they became established in the early eighteenth century as iron-masters and colliery owners in Wales, the Bacons had claimed descent from Nicholas, the half-brother of Francis, the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher and essayist. Eddy Bacon himself was sufficiently certain and proud of this collateral connection to have the one-time Lord Chancellor's coat of arms on his dinner plates; he also mentioned that he had once owned some of Francis Bacon's letters, which he had sold to the Duke of Portland to pay a gambling debt.¹ Francis Bacon the painter made little of his family's traditional claim. He was flattered enough by the idea of having such a famous ancestor, and amused by his namesake's well-known prodigality and homosexuality. What excited him most, however, was the notion that the philosopher-statesman might also have been 'Shakespeare', whose work he revered; and he was intrigued by the great essayist's experiments with refrigeration, since inventions of all kinds fascinated him. But he tended to question the claim and to maintain that there was no definite proof of the kinship.

If we search more recent generations of the family for traces of the character and qualities that set Bacon the artist apart, we can certainly find some in his great-grandfather, General Anthony Bacon (1796-1864). Having left Eton to join the 10th Hussars, this colourful and determined figure fought in the Peninsular War, then distinguished himself as the youngest of Wellington's officers at Water-loo. Later he formed a private army and entered the service of Don Pedro of Portugal, which left him impoverished since he never received the money he had advanced to his soldiers. In the meantime, he had married Lady Charlotte Harley, daughter of the fifth Earl of Oxford, whose story adds an intriguing note to Francis Bacon's family history, Charlotte's mother (Bacon's great-great-grandmother) had counted among her numerous lovers Lord Byron, who grew deeply attached to Charlotte when she was a child. He carried a lock of her hair and dedicated Childe Harold to the beautiful young girl, whom he addressed as 'Ianthe'. The attachment was mutual and quite possibly passionate. When Lady Charlotte went to live in Australia she travelled in a coach that had belonged to the poet, with his coat of arms and his motto, 'Crede Byron', emblazoned on its doors.

Eddy Bacon remained very conscious of his family's history. He never forgot that Queen Victoria had offered his father the possibility of reviving the lapsed title of Lord Oxford; since the family had never recovered its fortune, his father had declined the offer, claiming that a title would double his bills. But Eddy gave his first son the Oxford family name, Harley, and commemorated Byron's homage to his grandmother by naming his elder daughter Ianthe.²

Eddy himself had come to Ireland by a circuitous route. After being educated at Wellington, a public school with strong military connections, he joined the Durham Light Infantry. As a young lieutenant, he was initially posted to Ireland, where he developed a lifelong passion for horses and hunting. Then, in 1902, as a Captain in the Fourth Militia Battalion, he was shipped out to South Africa to fight in the last stages of the Boer War; he saw action for four months, much of it on horseback, and he was later awarded the Queen's Medal with clasps. When Captain Bacon returned to England, he was stationed at the regimental depot in Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he met, and not long after married, Winnie Firth.

Francis Bacon's own recollections of his parents' marriage cast it in a most unflattering light. According to him, it was only when his father had first proposed to a wealthier relation of his mother's and been rejected that he considered marrying Winnie, with a view above all to the money she would inherit from her family's business, Firth Steel. Winnie accepted him in spite of vigorous opposition from her family. They were married in London, at St George's, Hanover Square, in 1903; the groom was thirty-three years old and Winnie only nineteen. Eddy Bacon had resigned from the army shortly before the wedding with the rank of Honorary Major, although he continued to style himself Captain Bacon. Fifteen years as an infantry officer had fostered his innate belief in physical courage and toughness, but it had scarcely equipped him for civilian life. His keen interest in horses and field sports was undiminished, however, and, encouraged by the comfortable dowry his bride had brought to the marriage, he decided to try his hand at training racehorses.

The retired Captain had fond memories of Ireland from his hunting days, but above all he was aware that it would cost considerably less to set himself up there than in England. The first property the Bacon family rented in Ireland was Cannycourt House, a large, plain-fronted building with extensive stables situated near the small town of Kilcullen, in County Kildare, not far from Dublin. In the census returns for 1911, Eddy Bacon listed Cannycourt as consisting of eighteen rooms, occupied by the family and five servants, and twenty 'out-offices and farmsteadings' where the nine grooms lived and worked.³ But the property's main advantage, in Captain Bacon's eyes at least, was its proximity to the Curragh, one of the largest British Army barracks in Ireland and by extension an important centre for breeding and training horses.

By all accounts, life at Cannycourt House was not particularly agreeable. The house was run on military lines, with the emphasis on self-discipline, a regular routine and punctuality. The children were kept to the back of the house, and they rarely saw their parents except for half an hour after tea and, occasionally, for Sunday lunch. Eddy Bacon had time on his hands and he appears to have used it chiefly to tyrannize the household. He was remembered, not only by Francis, but by most people who met him, as opinionated, quarrelsome and rancorous. As a result, he always fell out with any friends he made, a serious handicap in the sociable world of breeding, training and racing horses. Although he had been quite dashing in his youth, photographs taken of Eddy Bacon in middle age show a sturdy, upright man with a hooded, supercilious gaze and a 'military' moustache; the only discernible similarities with his famous son are the powerful forearms, which he holds folded over his body, and the unusually large, fleshy hands. At home he was known and feared for his outbursts of rage, which were often prompted by such minor incidents as finding his boots not polished to his liking (the offending articles would then be hurled down the stairs). The retired Captain, who seems to have exuded a sour mixture of superiority and frustration, also had a moralizing, puritanical streak which, among other things, led him to ban alcohol from the house – an enforced abstinence for which his son would take spectacular revenge. On the other hand, the teetotal father gambled a great deal, particularly on the horses – which is something, as his no less censorious son remarked, that the best trainers do not do; and Francis himself described how he would be sent down regularly to the local post office to place his father's bets by telegram before the 'off' (which Francis, with an element of self-parody, pronounced the 'orf').

Musing over his childhood, Francis had little but negative comments to make about his father. He considered him an intelligent man who had never developed his mind and who had wasted all his opportunities, including the money his wife had brought to the marriage. Francis also emphasized how little liking or understanding there had been between father and son, particularly during his adolescence, when he was developing inclinations and ideas that could not have been more contrary to the conventional 'manliness' which Captain Bacon exemplified. Yet Francis remembered thinking his father was a good-looking man, and he experienced erotic sensations about him before he was even aware what sex was.

Winnie Bacon came from a background which contrasted sharply with her husband's. In place of fallen grandeur, with its hints of high office and lapsed titles, there was an exemplary North Country Victorian success story, characterized by hard work, shrewdness and a remarkable degree of philanthropy. Winnie's great-grandfather, Thomas Firth, established a small steelworks in Sheffield in the middle of the nineteenth century which grew into one of the world's biggest suppliers of castings for guns. Part of the fortune which his sons amassed by manufacturing cutlery as well was spent on providing Sheffield with almshouses, a public park (opened by the Prince of Wales in 1875) and Firth College, a large establishment devoted to higher education. Although money did not marry money in Winnie's case, her mother's sister, Eliza Highat Watson, had become the wife of Charles Mitchell, heir to a shipbuilding fortune; they lived in a vast neo-Gothic mansion called Jesmond Towers outside Newcastle, where her great-nephew Francis Bacon was to spend several holidays during the First World War. Winnie and her two brothers were brought up in an atmosphere of social ease and conventional respectability. Her father, who had been a Justice of the Peace, died at an early age, having suffered from chronic asthma, an affliction which Francis inherited; but even during his lifetime, John Loxley Firth had been overshadowed in the family circle by Winnie's mother, a lively, strong-willed woman who later followed her daughter to Ireland where, in addition to remarrying twice, she developed the closest of friendships with her grandson Francis.

This flamboyant and forceful grandmother was the one relative about whom Bacon spoke with unreserved warmth and admiration. She had taken, as her second husband, a leading Master of Foxhounds called Walter Bell, whose cruelty to animals and to his own children, which included horsewhipping them, led her to divorce him. She then married Kerry Supple, whose post as the Chief of Police for County Kildare made them particularly vulnerable to attack during the Troubles, and they lived in an attractive house she had bought, called Farmleigh, near Abbeyleix. Granny Supple, as she was known in the family, patently disliked Captain Bacon, which may be one reason why Francis felt especially drawn to her. The freedom with which she conducted her life, marrying three times and entertaining on a lavish scale, impressed him, particularly in view of the social constraints of the time and the rigours of his own upbringing. 'She had this marvellous ease and vitality,' Bacon recalled affectionately. 'And she was all the more remarkable if you think of what life was like in Ireland then. She loved having lots of people around her all the time, and she gave these parties that attracted a great deal of attention. There was one I remember that the Aga Khan came to, and that did strike local people as very exotic.' As well as being an accomplished hostess, Granny Supple showed a remarkable gift for needlepoint: she had such an instinctive sense of form, proportion and colour that she made large compositions directly in crewel, without referring to a preparatory sketch or a pattern. Francis sometimes stayed for long periods at his grandmother's house, and they grew particularly close. 'My grandmother and I used to tell each other everything,' Bacon recalled. 'I was a kind of confidant for her, I suppose, and I used to take her to the hunt balls and other things that went on when I was an adolescent. I never knew what to do when we got there, of course. She went off dancing, and I just stood around and looked ridiculous, because I was so shy at that time.'

In Francis's memory, his own mother was something of a pale reflection of this expansive, gregarious woman. Photographs of Winnie around the time of her marriage to Eddy Bacon show an unusually pretty, dark-haired young woman with an open face, well-defined features and an air of knowing her own mind. She was renowned for her composure, fixing her friends with her cool blue eyes and making remarks like: 'If you go away for a month, my dear, don't be surprised when you come back to find another woman in your husband's bed.' Practical and not given to shows of emotion, she remained superbly unflustered whenever Eddy raged around the house, which she kept in immaculate order, making sure that the most unlikely nooks and crannies were dusted. Although he got on well enough with his mother, Francis was scarcely less critical of her attitude towards him as a child than he was of the Captain's wrathful, censorious ways. He liked the fact that she was much more easy-going than his army-schooled father and enjoyed entertaining, but he resented the way her own pleasures always appeared to take precedence over his needs as a small, unusually demanding and sensitive son. After his father's death, when his mother had remarried and settled in South Africa, Bacon's relationship with her improved considerably; he took pride in the fact that she had remade her life, and when, as a successful artist, he went out to visit her, he realized that some of the bitterness he felt about her and his childhood had faded away.

For a shy, delicate day-dreamer of a boy, certainly, there was little comfort in the strict daily round of the Bacon household and the immediate outer world of horse-racing and hunting. Because of his asthma and other recurrent ailments, Francis was considered from early on the sickly child of the Bacon family – the 'weakling', as he himself put it. This did nothing to endear him to his physically robust, military father, who insisted on putting him astride a pony and sending him off to hunt at every opportunity. Any prolonged contact with dogs and horses brought on an asthma attack so severe that Francis would lie in bed for days, blue in the face, struggling for each breath. It can never have occurred to Eddy and Winnie, as they watched their son being given liberal amounts of morphine to ease his suffering, that Francis would turn out to be exceptionally resilient as an adult, as well as the only one of their three sons to live beyond the age of thirty.

The lack of parental affection was to some extent made up for by a person whom Bacon mentioned rarely in later life but to whom he remained deeply attached: the family nurse, a woman called Jessie Lightfoot, who was thirty-nine years old when Francis was born and who later went to live with him – in a ménage of poignant eccentricity – for the last twelve years of her life while he was attempting to establish himself as a painter in London.⁴ Bacon's grief at the death of this unlikely companion was so extreme that one close friend, the painter and writer Michael Wishart, wondered whether Jessie Light-foot had not in fact been the artist's mother.

Disaster was the leitmotif of nearly every memory Bacon chose to bring up when he talked about his childhood. To be sure, it struck the Bacon family on several occasions. Their youngest son, Edward, suffered from a weak chest like Francis, but he was not endowed with the same resilience, and he died as an adolescent in 1927. Edward's lack of robustness, curiously, does not seem to have alienated his father, who showed rare affection for his youngest boy. Captain Bacon had set his heart on Edward's going into the army, thereby continuing the family tradition, and he was devastated by his early death. Francis remembered the loss as the only time he had seen his father express real emotion; nevertheless, once the son's death had been announced, no one in the family mentioned it again. As Francis's cousin Pamela Matthews (nee Firth) remembers: 'Those things were heard and never discussed. You were just supposed to get on with your life.' Francis himself was convinced he knew why Edward had died. 'Edward had started going to the same school as I did, Dean Close in Cheltenham, and they asked for him to be taken away because he had been going with other boys. And then he developed tuberculosis, which as you know can be an emotional thing. There was no cure for the disease then, and he died.'

Captain Bacon's intolerance was by no means reserved for Francis. Harley, the eldest son, also crossed his father by becoming attached to the daughter of a hotel owner on the island of Anglesey, where the family had gone on holiday. 'My father thought it was quite impossible that my brother should be going with someone of that class,' Bacon recalled, 'so he sent him off to a job in South Africa. My brother worked there for a bit, then he went up to Northern Rhodesia and joined the police force. He was out somewhere with them while the Zambezi was in flood and he got lockjaw. They couldn't get him to a hospital in time and he died.'

Spurred no doubt by the feeling that their family had once been held in high respect in England, the Bacons were colonialists to the core. Captain Bacon's military service in South Africa set a pattern for the whole family: his eldest son and both his daughters moved to what was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART ONE 1909-44
• PART TWO 1944-63
• PART THREE 1963-92
• Postscript
• Notes
• Main Exhibitions
• Selected Bibliography
• Index