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Overview
In his revised and updated edition of an already brilliant biography, Michael Peppiatt has drawn on fresh material that has become available in the sixteen years since the artist’s death. Most important, he includes confidential material given to him by Bacon but omitted from the first edition. Francis Bacon derives from the hundreds of occasions Bacon and Peppiatt sat conversing, often late into the night, over many years, and particularly when Bacon was working in Paris. We are also given insight into Bacon’s intimate relationships, his artistic convictions and views on life, as well as his often acerbic comments on his contemporaries.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620876701 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2009 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
'The Weakling of the Family'
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 among 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 and expansively outstretched arms that invited his listeners to share his mirth, 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 62 Lower Baggot Street. His parents, Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon (1870–1940), known as Eddy, and Christina Winifred Loxley Firth (1884–1971), 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; as we shall see, Lady Charlotte Bacon, Francis Bacon's great-grandmother, had moved with her children to Australia in the mid-1860s. 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; built in 1705 by the first Earl, Robert Harley, and now destroyed, Eywood had been enlarged by the neo-classical architect, Robert Smirke, and its gardens landscaped by Capability Brown. Edward Bacon, 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 (c. 1540–1624), the much older half-brother of Francis, the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher and essayist (1561–1626). Eddy Bacon himself was sufficiently certain and proud of this collateral connection to have the onetime Lord Chancellor's coat of arms on his dinner plates (though his reckless son would certainly flout the family motto, 'Mediocria Firma' – 'moderation is safest'); 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. 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 philosopherstatesman 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, as seems increasingly probable, the kinship did exist, Bacon would have counted among his ancestors the distinguished artist Sir Nathaniel Bacon (1585–1627). Nephew of the philosopher Francis Bacon and a wealthy landowner, Nathaniel was widely noted in his own day for his exceptional pictorial skills, and he has come to be considered the most accomplished amateur painter of the period in England. Among the nine pictures of his to have survived, there is a striking, full-length self-portrait, in which the gentleman-artist's sword is shown hanging beside his palette, as well as several large still lifes, notably the exuberantly sensuous Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit (c. 1620–25) that belongs to Tate Britain.
Trawling through more recent generations of the family for traces of the character and qualities that set Francis Bacon apart, there is individualism and courage galore to be found in his greatgrandfather, 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 Waterloo, being wounded twice and having two horses die under him. He later formed a private army and entered the service of Don Pedro of Portugal, where he fought in the infamous siege of Oporto. Rich and profligate, General Bacon returned to England impoverished since he never received the money he had advanced to his soldiers and for a while he was imprisoned for debt. In the meantime, he had married Lady Charlotte Harley, daughter of the fifth Earl of Oxford, who had travelled to Portugal with him and 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 ('I could love her for ever if she could always be eleven years old,' the poet told a friend). 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. After her husband died, Lady Charlotte Bacon went to live for several years in Australia. She settled in Adelaide, where she created quite a stir by her beauty as well by travelling everywhere 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, Charlotte's grandson, 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, Eddy's father had declined the offer, claiming that a title would automatically double his tradesmen's 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.
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. Eddy was now a hardened veteran who had lived in the saddle, come frequently under fire and slept rough in trenches and on the veld; but the experience 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, Eddy 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. 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 with its own well-known racetrack.
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 absolute 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, in unconscious 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' that 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 that 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 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 that 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, like many inhabitants of industrial Sheffield, 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 (who rode with the Galway Blazers) called Walter Bell; but his cruelty to animals and to his own children, which included horsewhipping them, led her to divorce him. She then married Kerry Supple, who was appointed Chief of Police for County Kildare, a post that made the couple particularly vulnerable to attack during the Troubles; and they lived in a large, 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 in grand country houses, 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 would say with satisfaction. 'I was a kind of confidant for her, I suppose, and I used to take her to the hunt balls and all those 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, I suppose, 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 unlikely nooks and crannies, including the tops of doors, got dusted regularly. Although he felt instinctively more at ease 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.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2009 Michael Peppiatt.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xi
Preface xiii
Part 1 1909-44
1 The Weakling of the Family', 1909-26 3
2 Educated Abroad: Berlin and Paris, 1926-28 28
3 A Brief Apprenticeship, 1928-33 54
4 'Insufficiently Surreal', 1933-39 73
5 A Vision without Veils, 1939-44 94
Part 2 1944-63
6 Father Figures and Crucifixions, 1944-46 115
7 Towards Other Shores, 1946-50 133
8 Hounded by Furies, 1950-54 159
9 Truth Told by a Lie, 1954-58 186
10 Recognition at Home: The Tate Retrospective, 1958-63 215
Part 3 1963-92
11 'A Brilliant Fool Like Me', 1963-69 243
12 All the Honours of Paris, 1969-72 273
13 Elegy for the Dead, 1972-75 298
14 'My Exhilarated Despair', 1975-80 328
15 Alone in the Studio, 1980-84 357
16 'The Greatest Living Painter', 1984-92 375
Postscript: The Afterlife of an Atheist 393
Notes 419
Selected Bibliography 444
Index 449