WE ARE FORTUNATE IN OUR DEBTS. The Estate of Francis Bacon gave us a no-strings research grant, without which we could not have written this biography. The chairman of the Estate, the artist Brian Clarke, additionally provided us with rigorous help in certain areas of research. The catalogue raisonné, edited by Martin Harrison and published in 2016 under the auspices of the Estate, is today a model of its kind: an invaluable resource for scholars to which we have regularly turned with admiration and gratitude. Martin also made available to us the important diary of Bacon’s cousin, Diana Watson. At the Estate, Elizabeth Beatty granted us hours of cheerful assistance, and we miss the late Peter Hunt and Christophe Dejean, who brightened our early years in London. Ben Harrison and Sophie Pretorius, now working for the Estate, are highly informed and eternally cheerful accomplices in all things Bacon. They smoothed the way toward this book’s publication.
We have particularly benefited, of course, from the guidance of Shelley Wanger, our editor at Knopf, who is a model of forbearance—having first edited our biography of de Kooning. Her deft observations and wry smile helped immeasurably. She was ably assisted by Tatiana Dubin, a marvel of organization and patience, and the sharp-eyed Kevin Bourke, who caught both mistakes and infelicitous phrasings and endured with good humor a constantly changing text. We are grateful to Knopf’s Daniel Novack for providing careful legal counsel and to Paul Bogaards, Nicholas Latimer, and Erinn Hartman for organizing the launch of the book. In London, Arabella Pike at HarperCollins led an energetic, focused, and enthusiastic team. We particularly thank Marigold Atkey and Jo Thompson for their hours of careful attention, and Helen Ellis for her vigorous campaign for the book. In London, the literary agent Clare Conville was a dynamo of energy, ideas, and enthusiasm, while Molly Friedrich and Lucy Carson offered valuable advice in New York. If a book could have godparents, this one’s would be John and Jodie Eastman—who helped us during the writing of the de Kooning biography—and then, early on, encouraged us to write a biography of Bacon.
Apart from the Bacon Estate, other institutions with a special focus on the artist proved exceptionally generous. Majid Boustany—the founder of the Francis Bacon MB Foundation in Monaco and a tireless champion of the artist—is a remarkable man determined to collect (or correct) every possible fact and idea about the painter. Without his assistance and that of Aurélie Valion, who helped us delve into the foundation’s vast collection of images and articles, this book would have been the poorer. At the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, which displays in toto the Bacon studio that was once at Reece Mews, Barbara Dawson, Margarita Cappock, Jessica O’Donnell, Philip Roe and Logan Sisley steered us through their rich archive and were unfailingly kind in providing us with documents and photographs. In Tangier, Gerald Loftus took us through the historical records of TALIM (Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies). Anyone interested in English art will find the librarians and archive of the Tate Collection consistently useful, of course, and we owe special thanks to the descendants of John Rothenstein, who allowed us to examine his private diary.
At Marlborough Fine Arts—where Bacon exhibited for more than three decades— Gilbert Lloyd generously gave us access to the gallery archives and reminisced about the artist and his friends. He also arranged a meeting for us with the last living founder of the gallery, David Somerset, the Duke of Beaufort. Somerset provided droll and insightful views on Bacon and the gallery’s history. Also in the London office of the gallery, Kate Austin unfailingly provided us with assistance (and cups of tea), and both she and Geoffrey Parton introduced us to people who knew Bacon. We are also grateful to Mary Miller for providing assistance with images for the book. In the New York office of the gallery, Pierre Levai and David Robinson perceptively reminisced about Bacon. We also wish to thank Amy Baker at the Mayor Gallery in London, where Bacon made his debut as an artist: we gleaned many details about that early period from the Mayor archive and also from James Mayor, whose father founded the gallery in 1933.
Francis Bacon’s family, now mostly living in South Africa and Zimbabwe, were remarkably hospitable. The artist’s sister, the late Ianthe Knott, with whom we spoke at the outset of our research, was always cheerful and forthcoming when confronted by the annoying questions that a biographer must inevitably ask close relatives. In her understated and sometimes wry way, she provided us with a unique perspective on her parents and brother. Ianthe’s sons Keith and Harley Knott—together with Wendy Knott, Keith’s wife—shared without reserve many lively memories of Uncle Francis both in Africa and among his circle in London. The family added the kind of personal details that help a biographer locate the man behind the reputation.
Several individuals conducted research on our behalf. James Norton combed through English archives, interviewed sources, and located the Eric Allden diaries, which offer a fresh perspective on Bacon’s early years. Together with the filmmaker Adam Low, James also generously made available to us the full transcripts of the interviews conducted with the artist’s family and friends for Low’s Francis Bacon’s, Arena, first broadcast in 2006. These interviews included information from many people who died before we began work. In France, Anthi-Danaé Spathoni searched out sources, among them some who helped us better understand Bacon’s love of France—and France’s love of Bacon. Nadine Söll helped with research in Germany. In Ireland, the late, delightful Harry McDowell offered us his extensive knowledge of the Anglo-Irish milieu in which Bacon grew up, and he introduced us to a number of “big house” owners. Eugene McDermott gave us access to Bacon’s first home in Ireland, Cannycourt (now Kennycourt), while Marcus and Edel Beresford generously invited us to Straffan Lodge. Marcus also shared valuable house deeds with us.
Every biographer of Francis Bacon must perforce depend upon earlier biographies. There have been three, all published within five years of Bacon’s death in 1992: Michael Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1996); Daniel Farson’s The Gilded Gutter of Francis Bacon (1994); and Andrew Sinclair’s Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (1993). To any Bacon scholar, the Peppiatt and Farson will prove vital: both writers were friends of Bacon, and each inhabited a different part of Bacon’s world. Each therefore personally observed what the artist said and did under different circumstances. They are memoirists as well as biographers, in short, offering essential “primary source” material in addition to useful observations about the man and his art. The present biographers draw significantly, and gratefully, from both.
Other writers offered more glancing, but also useful, biographical information. In 2016, Jon Lys Turner published The Visitor’s Book, an account of the volatile but important relationship between Bacon and the colorful Wivenhoe couple Dicky Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller. Jon additionally made available to us the many unpublished Bacon letters in his possession, for which we are very grateful. Together with his partner Nikos Stangos, David Plante was for many years a friend of Bacon and, with his novelist’s eye for character and detail, has written tellingly about Bacon. He also gave us a memorable interview (and meal). Hugh Davies, who came to know Bacon earlier than most other scholars and became a friend of the artist, generously provided us at the outset of our research with the richly detailed transcripts of interviews that he conducted with Bacon in 1975. Martin Hammer did much to flesh out the artist’s important early relationship with Graham Sutherland in his Bacon and Sutherland, as did Heather Johnson with her biography of her great-uncle, Roy de Maistre.
The friends of José Capelo, who spoke to us anonymously, took enormous trouble to ensure that our research on José and Bacon was accurate. We cannot thank them enough. The indefatigable art dealer Maricruz Bilbao, the founding director of the Marlborough Gallery in Madrid, also located source after source for us in Spain. We could not have filled in Bacon’s last years without her and are deeply grateful. Patricia Ferrer, Ana Gamazo, Cristina Pons, the administration of Clinica Ruber, where Bacon died: all provided insights, as did Manuela Mena at the Prado and the art dealer Elvira González, her daughter Isabel Mignoni and Michel Soskine. And personal thanks must go to José Moreno and Juan Cruz for helping us navigate the culture of Madrid.
In London, James Birch—the inspiration behind Bacon’s groundbreaking exhibit in the Soviet Union in 1988—opened many doors for us, providing advice and the consistent pat-on-the-back encouragement that biographers require. So, too, did Charlotte Black, who introduced us to Terry Danziger Miles, the art dealer, to whom we are very grateful for interviews and many important details. In Paris, Eddy Batache and Reinhard Hassert—a couple who became close friends of Bacon in Paris—gave us a marvelous and stimulating account of Bacon’s later years there. Bacon always appreciated Eddy and Reinhard’s observations about art, culture, and the human comedy. So, too, do his biographers.
Bacon’s neighbor in South Kensington, Barry Joule—unfailingly ready with an observation—enriched our view of the painter’s last years at Reece Mews when Bacon often relied upon him for help. Danny Moynihan and Katrine Boorman’s reminiscences enlivened the narrative. So did the sharp eye and gift for recollection of the painter Anne Dunn. Not surprisingly, artists—among them Frank Auerbach, Claire Shenstone, Michael Clark, Anne Madden, Anthony Zych, and Virginia Verran—brought a special perspective to bear on Bacon, able to comment both on Bacon’s art and what it meant to live as an artist in London during the latter part of the twentieth century. Fr. David Lacy and Gerald Towell—the nephews of Peter Lacy—stimulated new ideas about the man who was the love of Bacon’s life. In Wivenhoe, Dan Chapman opened Dicky and Denis’s house to us, spending hours talking about their lives, and the artist Pam Dan and the singer Celia Hirst brought vividly to life the artistic and social milieu of Wivenhoe during the 1970s and ’80s. Paul Rousseau not only excited our interest in John Deakin, but brought us some fascinating photographs that Bacon and Wirth-Miller made together in Wivenhoe.
Some interviews became extended conversations over the years. Grey Gowrie, Richard Shone, James Birch, John-Paul Stonard, Barry Miles, and John Normile provided us with that kind of talk. So did the artist Alice Weldon, whose observations were always fresh and perceptive. Daniel Newburg—together with Anna and Huckleberry Smith—was remarkably welcoming and hospitable. Some important help came by mail and email. We are grateful to Lisa Cohen, whose All We Know helped restore Madge Garland to her rightful place in the history of the period, and to Rev. Charles Whitney, the archivist of Dean Close School, which was the only school that Bacon ever attended. We would be remiss if we didn’t mention certain friends and sources who have died, among them John Richardson, Margaret Fenton, Christopher Gibbs, Lindy Dufferin, Louis le Brocquy, Celia Hirst, Janetta Parladé, Annie Ross, and John Ashbery.
We learned much wandering in the ever-expanding universe of writing about British art, but want particularly to mention the smaller world of writers and people especially concerned with Bacon-related themes, which includes (among many writers) Richard Calvocaressi, William Feaver, Martin Gayford, Adrian Clark, David Cohen, and Geordie Greig. We owe special thanks to the New York Public Library not only for the invaluable collection we consulted, but also for the Cullman fellowship it awarded to Mark. The lively biographers’ colloquium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, inspired both of us. In England, our friends of many decades, Daphne Green and her family, provided a warm welcome. So did our daughters, who were in England during much of this period: Pippa, at The King’s School, Canterbury, and Emmy, who was working in London. Visits with them enlivened drudgy days. Emmy spent many hours researching photographs for this book, while her husband Rory Green, a Dubliner, provided insight (seasoned with humor) into Ireland’s history.
We remain grateful to all who found the time to be interviewed. It should go without saying that the book’s failures belong to us alone.