Francis Bacon (artist) facts for kids
Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British painter.
Early life
At that time, all of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. His father, army Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon, known as Eddy, was born in Adelaide, South Australia, to an English father and an Australian mother. Eddy was a veteran of the Boer War, a racehorse trainer, and grandson of Major-General Anthony Bacon. Bacon was raised by the family nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, from Cornwall, known as "Nanny Lightfoot", a maternal figure who remained close to him until her death.
The family moved house often, moving between Ireland and England several times, leading to a sense of displacement which remained with Bacon throughout his life. They returned to Ireland after the First World War.
Career
Bacon did not begin to paint until his late twenties, having drifted in the late 1920s and early 1930s as an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler. He said that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. From the mid-1960s he mainly produced portraits of friends, either as single, diptych or triptych panels. Following the death of his lover George Dyer in 1971 (memorialised in his Black Triptychs, and a number of posthumous portraits) his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death. The climax of his later period is marked by the masterpieces Study for Self-Portrait (1982) and Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86.
Despite his bleak outlook, Bacon was charismatic, articulate and well-read.
Bacon's subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.
Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work, which numbers in the region of 590 extant paintings along with many others he destroyed, typically focused on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats.
Since his death, Bacon's reputation has grown steadily, and his work is among the most acclaimed, expensive and sought-after on the art market. In the late 1990s a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed, including early 1950s pope paintings and 1960s portraits, re-emerged to set record prices at auction.
Death
While on holiday, Bacon was admitted to the private Clinica Ruber, Madrid in 1992. His chronic asthma, which had plagued him all his life, had developed into a more severe respiratory condition and he could not talk or breathe very well.
He died of a heart attack on 28 April 1992.
Auction value
By 1989 Bacon was the most expensive living artist after one of his triptychs sold at Sotheby's for over $6 million. In 2007, actress Sophia Loren consigned Study for Portrait II (1956) from the estate of her late husband Carlo Ponti at Christie's. It was auctioned for the then record price of £14.2 million ($27.5 million).
In 2008, the Triptych, 1976, sold at Sotheby's for €55.465 million ($86.28 million), then a record for a work by Bacon and the highest price paid for a postwar work of art at auction up to 2008. In 2013, Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold at Christie's New York for $142.4 million, surpassing both Triptych and 1976 in auctioned value, and more importantly claiming the record for highest auction price of a work of art at that time, a title previously held by the fourth version of Edvard Munch's Scream and now held by Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi.
Images for kids
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Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944. Oil and pastel on Sundeala board. Tate Britain, London
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Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963
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The site of Bacon's relocated studio, Dublin
See also
In Spanish: Francis Bacon (pintor) para niños
