7

Stage Sets

READERS OF The Studio, an elegant English monthly with an international outlook, knew what they wanted: the latest trends in design; an overview of the current art shows; an indication of who was up and who was down in the world of decorating; and anything that might constitute “the new look.” Founded in London in 1893, The Studio was the sort of insider magazine that helped make or break reputations, and like Madge Garland’s and Dorothy Todd’s Vogue of a few years before, it had a strong modernist slant, though its purview was wide. Articles were devoted to such topics as mosaics, folk art, and “Modern Electric Light Fittings.” It might also run a letter on art written by Picasso. The magazine regularly covered events in both France and England (“The Trend of Decorative Art: The Salon d’Automne,” “The Spring Salon of the Artistes Decorateurs”).

The Studio magazine’s “The 1930 Look in British Decoration,” which included a spread on a young designer named Francis Bacon

Courtesy Studio International, www.studiointernational.com

The six-page spread that appeared in the August 1930 issue—under the headline “The 1930 Look in British Decoration”—would typically have showcased the work of leading designers of the day. And it did so in part. Its second feature focused on an ornate room decorated for Lady Gerald Wellesley by the Bloomsbury lights Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell; the room contained six life-sized murals (painted by Grant), wall sconces, and cane-backed chairs. The third feature celebrated the strong masculine aesthetic of the influential designer Serge Chermayeff: woodwork in English walnut, solid rectilinear furniture, and a functional sliding partition to separate the dining and living rooms. But the surprise of the package was the opening feature, which was entirely devoted to the spare, stripped-down work of a complete unknown whose name was Francis Bacon. Only the feature on Grant and Bell contained a byline—Madge Garland—but the writing in all three was consistent. Garland was the author.

Garland was a cat with nine lives. Her affair with Dorothy Todd had long since concluded. Her sacking by Vogue was ancient history, at least according to the fashion clock. After her extended stays in France, she took a job in 1929 editing the women’s section of Britannia and Eve magazine, a general-interest monthly for women. It was not a position her highbrow Bloomsbury friends respected. “Rebecca West told her she could not possibly be associated with such a lowbrow publication, especially one with a name as absurd as Britannia and Eve,” wrote Lisa Cohen in All We Know. But for the practical Garland it provided a salary during an economically perilous period. And she could find other ways to maintain her Bloomsbury connections and her presence in the design world.

Garland regularly championed her friends in The Studio. One signed article by Garland from 1930 focused on Eyre de Lanux, her good friend in Paris and the designer who collaborated with Evelyn Wyld at Jean Désert after Eileen Gray left for the South of France. Garland never acknowledged that she was writing about friends or that she herself, for example, organized the exhibition of Eyre de Lanux’s interiors at the Curtis Moffat gallery in London to which her own piece referred. Her tone remained one of impartial observation. Two other favourites of Garland’s were the Bloomsbury-connected designers E. McKnight Kauffer and Marion Dorn. Kauffer, an American born in Montana, was a colleague of Graham Sutherland’s and revolutionized British graphic art with his use of cubist geometry in—among other celebrated instances—posters for the Shell Oil Company. Garland was in love, not so secretly, with Kauffer’s partner, an important designer in her own right who, like Bacon, had her rugs made at Wilton’s. While the couple’s work was exhibited at the Moffat gallery, Garland published an unsigned piece in The Studio called “New Designs for Wilton Rugs by E. McKnight Kauffer and Marion V. Dorn: A Conversation with a Studio Representative.”

It was a measure of Garland’s extraordinary esteem and personal regard for Bacon that she chose to open her spread, “The 1930 Look in British Decoration,” with the work of the unknown twenty-year-old. No other young artists or designers were featured in the magazine during those years. It was so unprecedented that Garland took pains to enhance Bacon’s résumé: “Francis Bacon is a young English designer who has worked in Paris and in Germany for some years and is now established in London.” Apart from wanting to help Bacon, Garland was also looking—as always—to advance the cause of modernism in provincial London. “We have been perhaps slower than other nations in adapting ourselves to new ideas in furnishing and decorating,” she wrote, “but are gradually becoming accustomed to discriminating between what really is new and good in modernist interiors and what is new and bad.” She named Bacon an example of the former: “The appeal of steel and glass is a strong one, and Francis Bacon shows us individualistic variations on this theme.”

The spread included a large-scale photo of Bacon’s showroom and alluded to the earlier purpose of the space as an “uninteresting” garage. No doubt Garland herself had observed the metamorphosis. She singled out the unorthodox window treatment: “The windows—not shown—are curtained with white rubber sheeting, that hangs in sculptural folds.” These same curtains, surgically isolating the room from the outside world, would be part of Bacon’s makeover of several fashionable rooms, including one designed for Garland herself. She also mentioned the “cocktail bracket of steel and glass—a space-saving device” that earlier provoked the quarrel at Vincent Square between Bacon and Allden. Two smaller photos highlighted individual pieces—one of a dressing table “in black and white glass” and one of another of Bacon’s signature round tables: “The round table has metal legs coloured pink and the glass top is half frosted and half clear.”

Perhaps most interesting of all was Garland’s description of Bacon’s rugs. “His rugs are particularly representative of today, and their inspiration springs from nothing Oriental or traditional—they are purely thought forms.” Four decades later, recalling the era in her 1968 book The Indecisive Decade: The World of Fashion and Entertainment in the Thirties, Garland took some pride in her early patronage of Bacon—and used some of the same language she used in the 1930s to describe his work. The inclusion of Bacon in her book seemed to emerge out of nowhere, with no context, unless one knew about her Studio piece and the room she personally commissioned Bacon to design. “Francis Bacon, today internationally famous as a painter, was himself responsible for a ‘constructivist’ room,” she wrote. “In this room long shelves were built against white walls, neutral-coloured rugs were woven in ‘thought forms,’ curtains were made of white surgical rubber sheeting and low glass tables, like the wall-mirrors, were circular in shape.”

The Studio feature—everything Bacon could hope for—capped what must have been a frantic three or four months as the designer struggled to transform 17 Queensberry Mews into his version of the Galerie Jean Désert. It was not simple to turn an oily garage into a modernist dream. And he faced an unforgiving deadline. The showroom would have to be photographed well in advance if the article were to be published in the summer. Bacon—who relied on deadlines all his life to complete work—renovated the space in time. The Studio photographer who came to Queensberry Mews found a stark white room that, when compared to the frumpiness outside, represented an alternative world, like a stage set made for a science-fiction film about the future—a beguiling mix of radiant white, gleaming steel, mirrored glass, boxy chairs, animal skins, and mysterious geometries.

Exotic animal skins and patterns played an important part in art deco, but Bacon probably had additional reasons for making use of them. They reflected his ongoing fascination, since his teenage years, with big-game animals and Africa and also served as a robust, earthy foil to a pared-down aesthetic with which he was probably not entirely comfortable. The month of the photo shoot for the Studio article, Bacon wrote an upbeat letter to “Dearest Mummie” and enclosed some photographs. He took a moment to describe, in his free-form writing style, what she should particularly notice:

The staircase leads up into the rooms above. They are all rugs hanging on the walls The screen behind the glass table which lights up is not finished but I have done another panel since the photograph was taken I do so hope you will like them Do let me know. The little snap I also took. Do you like the rug above the calfskin pouff. It is my favourite, it has a brilliant yellow background The design is in dark brown, white, green, lavender and black. The table with the beads on [it] is of pale finish enamel and in the mirror is a black dressing table I will send you one of the desk as soon as I get it.

An outtake from The Studio photo shoot that Bacon sent to his mother, with detailed descriptions of his furniture and rugs

Courtesy of Ianthe Knott

Bacon also sent photographs to his mother of individual pieces, writing descriptions of them on the back of the images. One photograph displayed a square table of “silver oak with a black glass top” on top of which rested a “seagull by [Jacques] Adnet”—a fashionable art deco designer. Bacon ended the letter with “All my love to you and Daddie for Easter. I am sending the children Easter eggs today love Francis.” Bacon’s mother would support her son in whatever he endeavoured to do, but she was clearly bewildered by his interest in modern design. (She would have been dumbfounded by Paul Frankl’s proscription in his book New Dimensions against the classical Oriental rugs favoured by the British ruling class: “There is little excuse for the use of Oriental rugs except that one has them around and one has grown up with the impression that they are of immense value and therefore must be held quite sacred. Some people are either born with or inherit a flock of Oriental rugs; others marry into a family of them. There are some, however, who set out deliberately to buy them and for such there is little hope or excuse.”) Two years later, Bacon gave his mother a mirrored glass table, a rug, and a stool with a zebra-skin cover. Winnie placed the pieces in her bathroom, where no one else would see them.

After the showroom was completed and photographed, but before the article appeared, Allden proposed an Easter getaway: his young friend surely deserved a respite after all his work. Bacon sent the Easter eggs to his sisters, then travelled with Allden to Cologne and Munich to attend the Passion Play at Oberammergau, famously performed once a decade at Easter time by the inhabitants of the Bavarian village. The play presented the story of Christ from his entry into Jerusalem until his Crucifixion and Resurrection. No doubt the devout Allden, who also loved the theatre, enjoyed the seven-hour-long Passion Play. Bacon was less appreciative. He disliked the Bavarian Alps, but found certain parts of the performance impressive, notably when the cross was lifted at twilight. He was growing interested in various depictions of the Crucifixion. He was too closely involved in his projects to stay on the Continent for long, however. Outside 17 Queensberry Mews, next to the stairs that led up to the door on the second floor, Bacon now hung a sign: FRANCIS BACON, DESIGNER. He was open for business. The artist H. M. Sutton, passing by that summer, happened to see the sign. “I was hawking my portfolio of art work, hopefully, to prospective buyers,” he wrote to Bacon years later. “Intrigued by the sign I walked up the steps. At the top the door being open I walked in on to a narrow landing. Below was a pristine studio its walls hung with one, or two, rugs in simple colours and geometric design signed Francis Bacon. You looked up from the centre of the studio and kindly invited me down. We checked over my work.” Bacon also prepared a business card that included a logo rather like the one Eileen Gray had created for Jean Désert. “Francis Bacon” appeared in a modern, geometric sans-serif font, set against a triangle and a series of narrow parallel lines that ran horizontally from the top towards the bottom of the logo. His address appeared just below his name, and below that was “Modern Decoration, Furniture in Metal, Glass and Wood/Rugs and Lights.”

Once the Studio feature appeared, Bacon could look forward to more business. But he also faced a new challenge. How should he capitalize on the feature and his dramatic new space? He could aggressively seek commissions, of course, and operate a high-end furniture showroom with regular hours. That was what he should do to advance his reputation. But he also had more time now to paint. During the summer of 1930, Bacon met a serious and well-regarded Australian painter named Roy de Maistre, another somewhat older gentleman—there was a fifteen-year age difference between them—who took a keen interest in the young designer, his showroom, and his painting. De Maistre gave Bacon an idea.

Of the artists whom Bacon befriended during his early years in London, Roy de Maistre was the most important. Like Bacon, de Maistre was a “sort of outsider” in London—his family was Australian—and his father was a horse breeder. Unlike Bacon’s “failed horse trainer” of a father, however, de Maistre’s was successful and owned an extensive farm. His family was devoutly Catholic. Born in New South Wales in 1894, the ninth child and sixth son in a large household, de Maistre was named Leroy Livingston de Mestre. Like Bacon, he became the family misfit and weakling. And, like Bacon, he was an asthmatic homosexual who preferred music and art to horses. He was remembered, in one account, “as a prissy little boy who always wore a bow-tie at play and wheeled his pram of dolls through the paddocks.”

De Maistre grew up to become “a short stubby man without much hair … always correct in his manner … always neatly dressed in a grey flannel pinstripe suit, which he wore when he painted and never made dirty.” He left his family early—at age eighteen or nineteen—to study art and music in Sydney, then emigrated to Europe in 1930. He seemed to live by unknown means, dressing like an Edwardian aristocrat. He liked to imply that he had noble blood, sometimes intimating that the mysterious limousine that regularly parked discreetly in his London neighbourhood belonged to a member of the royal family. (It belonged to a wealthy homosexual patron.) De Maistre served dinner on fine china, secretly on loan from his cousin, indulged in fresh flowers daily, and spent ninety-eight pounds to line his dressing gown with fur when he came into a little extra money. He doted over a possible family link to the eighteenth-century French philosopher Count Joseph de Maistre. His Australian family was unfortunately named de Mestre, however, so he eventually changed his surname to “de Maistre,” and his given names to Leroy Leveson Laurent Joseph. Around the time he met Bacon, he was still de Mestre but had already shortened “Leroy” to “Roi”—French for “king.” In the end, he found that too obviously pretentious. The artist known in the late 1920s as Roi de Mestre eventually became Roy de Maistre.

De Maistre was a serious artist. He studied colour relationships with the intensity, dreaminess, and putative scientific authority that was typical of the era. Like Wassily Kandinsky, de Maistre regarded colour as visual music, and before he left Australia for Europe, he was already known for comparing music and colour. (He originally studied violin and viola at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music and, at the same time, learned painting at the Royal Art Society.) Eventually, de Maistre created a colour chart in the shape of a wheel that corresponded to musical notes. He used his colour chart as the basis for the “colour-music” pictures that he painted throughout the 1920s, in which colours were chosen to harmonize as they would in a musical scale. His paintings had titles like The Boat Sheds, in Violet Red Key. His most famous painting, completed in 1919, was called Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor and was regarded as the first example of abstract art in Australia. The Colour in Art show of the same year that introduced his work to Sydney was both controversial and a huge draw: some seven hundred people attended the opening.

De Maistre was a more experimental artist in Australia than he became in London. At the time he met Bacon, however, he was regarded as modern, established, and sophisticated—even about interior decoration. De Maistre had also done some serious design work as a young man, a fact that no doubt drew him to Bacon, in whom he probably saw something of his younger self. One of the purposes of his Colour Harmonizing Disc was to help interior decorators use colours knowledgeably, leading to the creation of an ideal modern room. De Maistre remained deeply interested, as was Bacon then, in the invention of a room of his own. The atmosphere of de Maistre’s later studio, dating from the mid-1930s, was arguably one of his greatest creations.

De Maistre’s reputation preceded him to London. No sooner did he arrive than an exhibition of his work was held, in July 1930, at the Beaux Arts Gallery, then one of the few galleries in London showing contemporary art. The gallery had been founded in 1923 by the sculptor Frederick Lessore and was later run by his wife, Helen, a painter with a particularly discerning eye. (Bacon would say that he had not known a better eye than that of Helen Lessore.) Bacon met de Maistre soon after the Australian’s arrival in London. The connection was almost certainly through Gladys MacDermot, a wealthy Irish patron of art and artists who knew Bacon and had met de Maistre during the period from 1925 to 1929, when she lived in Australia and was part of the theatre and art circles in Sydney. De Maistre, then part of the decorating world, had designed a room for her house, and he would naturally have wanted to see the room splashed across the pages of The Studio and created by this boy who possessed such charm.

Whatever his affectations, de Maistre, like Allden, was a kind and paternal man who enjoyed helping younger people. He became enamoured of Bacon, though their relationship was almost certainly never sexual. (De Maistre’s one passionate affair in the 1930s, a well-known one, was with an important art dealer named Robert Wellington.) Effeminate queens did not, in any case, sexually attract Bacon. But that suggested nothing, of course, about the potential for friendship. De Maistre liked spending time with Francis. At a certain point, he asked if he might possibly paint a picture of Bacon’s showroom at 17 Queensberry Mews and if, perhaps, Bacon himself would sit for a portrait.

That summer or autumn de Maistre painted two pictures of the showroom and also a portrait of Bacon. It was probably then that Bacon and de Maistre came up with the idea that paintings could also be exhibited in this white modern room. De Maistre knew that the young designer was struggling to paint—as he himself had once done while engaged in decorating work—and he thought that Bacon might be intrigued by the idea of de Maistre’s portrait of a designer hanging in the designer’s own showroom. De Maistre had just exhibited at an established gallery, but was no less pleased to show his work in this young designer’s singular space. The boy was young, talented, and untrained. Perhaps de Maistre could even help him with some technical tips about oil painting, and they could both exhibit their paintings in the space.

It would have been odd, however, to exhibit only two painters in Bacon’s showroom—the one well-known, the other the nameless owner. It would have looked as if Bacon were reaching too boldly for a reputation he did not possess. And so Bacon thought of a third artist with whom to exhibit, but not one as well-known as de Maistre. Jean Shepeard, a remarkable actress and artist in her mid-twenties then making her way in London, had also grown up around horses, just not the kind raised by the Bacon and de Mestre families. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Romania. When she was a child, her stepfather—an itinerant tinker—moved the family to Ireland, where they travelled in a horse-drawn covered wagon from fairground to fairground selling and mending saucepans. Despite her unconventional background, Shepeard was educated at a foundation school and managed to enter the Slade School of Fine Art in London, after which she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She seemed talented at everything—and liked by everyone. She knew painters and painted well, just as she knew actors and was a gifted actress. She was popular in Bloomsbury. She was a real force, said her niece Doreen Kern, “very domineering—an organizer.”

Like de Maistre, Shepeard was more established in 1929 than Bacon. She had been included in a Summer Salon show at the Redfern Gallery along with Augustus John, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry. She also exhibited at the Picture Lending Society on Bloomsbury Street with Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Ben Nicholson. A critic in 1931 wrote that Shepeard “has urgently something to say and at her best draws with great nervous vigour and amazing emotional power. Her work is alive, sensitive, and stimulating.” Shepeard was never without her sketchbook, and many writers, actors, and artists of the day sat for her. Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Noël Coward, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, and T. S. Eliot all were captured in her line drawings. For four years she roomed with the actress Peggy Ashcroft on Gordon Square, a part of Bloomsbury, and she performed regularly on the London stage. She once toured with John Gielgud (who remembered her well years later). Eventually, she founded and ran her own theatre company.

Shepeard may have met Bacon through her lover of the time, the Irish landscape painter Ronald Ossory Dunlop. Dunlop’s background would have interested Bacon. His father was one of Yeats’s best friends, and his parents were key figures in the Irish literary renaissance. Or, possibly, Shepeard and Bacon met through theatre connections, such as the actor Ernest Thesiger, who was also a friend of Eric Allden. (Allden’s friends in the theatre world included Noël Coward as well.) In her biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, a close friend of Thesiger’s, Hilary Spurling memorably captured Thesiger’s manner: “He had enlisted as a private in 1915 and baffled his commanding officer by taking his needlework with him,” she wrote. “Ernest Thesiger was the man who said, or is supposed to have said, when asked for a first-hand impression of Ypres, ‘My dear, the noise!! and the people!!’.” Thesiger was a noted presence in so many different London worlds that he himself probably lost count. But the most likely connector, once again, was Madge Garland. Both Garland and Shepeard were woven into the world of Bloomsbury. Garland would have appreciated Shepeard’s quick line, which was as deft (and sometimes caricatural) as a fashion illustrator’s, though with a more serious intent. It was not uncommon then for artists and designers to exhibit together. Not only did few galleries of the time sell contemporary art, but many thoughtful people found the distinction between the decorative and fine arts artificial: the mix of genres in The Studio was proof of that. The Omega Workshops (1913–19), a Bloomsbury enterprise overseen by Roger Fry, had famously sought to erase or modulate such distinctions and made the argument that artists themselves should exhibit their own work.

The three artists agreed to exhibit in Bacon’s design showroom. Shepeard provided eight pastels and twenty-two drawings, including portrait drawings of her two collaborators. De Maistre contributed seven paintings, among them an early Portrait of Francis Bacon that has been lost. (A few years later, he would paint a sensitive portrait of Bacon that did survive.) De Maistre’s painting titled Francis Bacon’s Queensbury [sic] Mews Studio highlighted Bacon’s stark, soaring staircase to maximum effect. Bacon himself exhibited four paintings and a print called Dark Child. Just one Bacon picture from the show, Trees by the Sea, survived his destruction of his early work, probably because Eric Allden purchased it. It was later retitled Painting (1929–30) and may be the first oil Bacon completed. It was substantially larger, at three feet by two feet, than his small gouaches. Blocky forms represented tree trunks. Their branches, shorn of leaves, protruded skyward. A stylized beach was seen in the distance. The painting resembled the work of the French painter Jean Lurcat (as Ronald Alley indicated in the first catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s art), in particular a 1926 Lurcat oil entitled Paysage à Smyrne, l’arbre mort. Bacon might have been partly drawn to Lurcat because of his work in tapestry, which had an obvious connection to artful rugs.

Invitation card for the 1930 show at Queensberry Mews of the work of Bacon, Roy de Maistre, and Jean Shepeard—Bacon’s first public appearance

Courtesy of Richard Shone. The card illustrated his article “Francis Bacon in the 1930s: An Early Exhibition Rediscovered,” in the Burlington Magazine, April, 1996.

Bacon also exhibited his own furniture and rugs. Some rugs were hung on the walls like tapestries or cubist paintings. Bacon’s folding screen was arguably the most striking work on view. Each of the three panels was six feet tall by two feet wide and contained stylized figures with tiny heads placed in a mysterious and theatrical space reminiscent of, among others, de Chirico. (Eric Allden also bought this screen, which he kept with him for the rest of his life.) Before the opening, Bacon printed a handsome invitation card in “fashionable eau-de-nil and black,” as the art critic and historian Richard Shone described it in a piece in the Burlington Magazine devoted to the early show. He also made up a small catalogue/leaflet to give to visitors that listed the works on display. It contained the dates of the show—November 4–22—and the times (“Daily from 10–6”) it was open to the public. The pricing was ambitious. For his paintings, Bacon asked between twenty-five to forty-five guineas, very high for an unknown artist. (Guineas were considered a “gentlemanly” payment suitable for artists; craftsmen were paid in pounds.) The pictures of the better-known de Maistre—or de Mestre, as he was still known—were priced at twenty to forty guineas. Jean Shepeard asked four or five guineas for her pastels and two guineas for her drawings. Bacon was in business.

Painting of Bacon’s Queensberry Mews studio by Roy de Maistre, the first artist-mentor in Bacon’s life

© Caroline de Mestre Walker and Belinda Price, courtesy of de Mestre Walker

At least one reviewer covered the show, as a clipping kept by Jean Shepeard attested. It was unsigned and undated; the publication was unknown. The reviewer praised Shepeard’s work for being “of great sensibility and beauty of line … full of vigour and character.” But the critic was mainly interested in the design elements of the show, treating the paintings as part of the larger environment. The headline on the piece was “Pictures for Interior Decoration”:

Transported into different and less congenial surroundings, these paintings might lose some of their interest, their main raison d’être being the decorative purpose which they serve in a general scheme of interior decoration. Not that Mr Bacon and Mr de Mestre are not gifted painters, but their individual eye seems to express itself chiefly in their sense of the fitness of their pictorial efforts to the ambient style of the room in which they hang. The pictures continue on the dead-white walls the shapes and designs of the metal furniture and the rugs.

The critic noted and praised the curious effect created by the two de Maistre painstings that depicted the very same interior in which they were exhibited, “a fact which in the present surroundings makes them appear like mirrors reflecting the room in different angles.” Bacon and de Maistre would also note this beguiling mirror-within-a-mirror quality, of course, but it was doubtful that Bacon privately responded with equanimity. For the young designer it would have been an odd experience—perhaps disturbing in a stimulating way—to have the gifted older painter bring his witches’ brew of brushes and paints into Bacon’s pristine showroom and then, in the resulting composition, claim the room as a subject for his brush.

The juxtaposition between art and design was provocative. De Maistre depicted a very different room from the one illustrated in The Studio. The light in his paintings was subdued and melancholy, with nothing of the cheeky white élan suggested by The Studio photographs or noted by reviewers. In one picture, de Maistre emphasized the bars in the small windows at the far corner of the studio, some distance away from the dramatic stairway. In the other—a painting of the main studio space—he transformed the room into subtle relationships among planes and angles; the two glass-and-chrome tables provided the only curves in a space dominated by the angular stairway, the blocky desk at the foot of the staircase, and two rectangular rugs on the floor. In neither painting did the art deco sculpture have a fashionable gleam.

Serious paintings can burn holes in a fashionable room, and Bacon would have felt their lively intrusion in his decorated space. The de Maistres returned his gaze in a way the calfskin pouffe did not. Did his own paintings simply fit, as the critic said, into “the ambient style of the room in which they hang”? Did his cubist rugs, which he hung on the wall as almost-paintings, hold the eye as actual cubist paintings did? Could his large oil painting of a tree, which de Maistre may have encouraged Bacon to paint, inhabit the same world as his pouffe? Bacon’s own sensibility as a designer was still not wholly clear. Although he was attracted to Eileen Gray’s emptied spaces and elegant minimal aesthetic, he also liked Mallet-Stevens’s robust, comfortable furniture. Where was his room? Which was his stage?

As he walked about his showroom, Bacon would also have paused before the two portraits to look into his own refracted face, as presented by Shepeard and de Maistre. The room did not just display his furniture. It presented him. Shepeard ordinarily depicted her subjects as open-eyed individuals charged with feeling. Her drawing of de Maistre, for example, described a balding, affable-looking person, his head resting against one hand, who appeared to be listening intently to someone just outside the frame. The actress personally knew Bacon as a charming young man with a bright laugh and big blue eyes, but she obviously saw something else too, which was reflected in her portrait. She portrayed him as a young man sealed off, his eyes sewn almost shut. He was not looking from the wall into his own room. In the middle of each closed eye she drew twisty vertical lines, like the loose threads around a knot.

Following this small splash in London—just four months after he had been featured in a trend-setting magazine and appeared in an exhibition—Bacon fell silent. No more shows; no more reviews. He was not a natural businessman. He did not appear able in a systematic way to cultivate the wealthy, study the market, keep appropriate records, and hire useful employees. The most important reason for Bacon’s sudden silence, however, was probably the obvious one: he was losing interest in the field of design.

Or, more likely, the desire to be an artist finally possessed him. The young Bacon continued to dream of a Picasso-like eruption, liberating the dark forces suppressed within the conventional figure. How was he to do that? He lacked technical training, and he did not know what his art should look like. He was twenty-one years old. He had a further difficulty. Although he was drawn to explosive art, he was also strongly attracted to a more restrained style, one that focused on nuance and the quiet way a sensual passage of paint could come alive. He sometimes seemed pulled in opposite directions. Explosive or restrained; bestial or civilized; masked or revealed; raw or cooked. In fact, these contraries could form—over time—a sensibility locked in natural tension. A shy homosexual boy beset by illness might want to hide in a closet, growing there to love the shadowy thoughts and melancholy pleasures of the concealed life. That did not mean the same boy might not also dream of delirious release. In the months after his November 1930 exhibition of painting and design in Queensberry Mews, Bacon talked of going to pagan Greece, and he was already reading Nietzsche, who longed to transcend the Western room.

Drawing of Bacon by Jean Shepeard, a gifted portraitist who drew many of Bloomsbury’s most famous figures, and who showed with Bacon and de Maistre at Queensberry Mews

Courtesy of Doreen Kern

In 1931, as Bacon took up the life of a committed artist, he became captivated by two novels, one particularly English, the other exceptionally French. Wuthering Heights was a novel of suffocation and release. It moved between the boundless moors of Yorkshire (where the young Bacon traditionally visited his Watson relatives) and the close rooms of polite society. It was steeped in suppressed family secrets and explosive revelations. Over the entrance to Wuthering Heights were grotesque carvings, and the stormy Heathcliff—a man from nowhere who performed different social roles while remaining for ever an outsider—was a sexually charged violator of boundaries. The visceral energy of Emily Brontë’s novel, sometimes regarded as coarse by refined tastes, could nourish and inspire a young artist like Bacon, just then emerging largely unschooled from adolescence. Les Enfants terribles, which Jean Cocteau published in 1929 and Bacon probably read in French, came out the following year in England as The Holy Terrors. Like the Brontë novel, it was a theatrical story full of secrets and revelations. Its action took place mostly in a claustrophobic sickroom occupied by two adolescents, an isolated brother named Paul and his sister Elisabeth, who engage in incestuously suffused games that eventually explode in a shattering release. Bacon was particularly taken with its opening scene, an ecstatic snowball fight among schoolboys during which Paul is hurt by a stone buried inside a snowball thrown by a beautiful, brutish boy whom Paul loves. Bacon even wrote a “scenario” for a film that resembled something from Cocteau. Perhaps he might become a filmmaker …

In June 1931, Bacon saw Thirty Years of Picasso at the Alex Reid & Lefevre gallery in London. It included an important painting from the artist’s Dinard series, Baigneuse (1929), and Abstraction (Figure) painted in 1930. Bacon had already seen Picasso’s abstracted figural shapes—which suggested new ways of capturing the emotional truth of the figure—but probably only in the art magazines. Not only would Bacon’s work in the following years often reflect the Dinard series, but the Reid & Lefevre exhibition demonstrated that in London itself there was also a small group of artists, collectors, and critics who supported Picasso; that is, an audience. In 1931, Bacon visited his cousin Diana in Bishopthorpe, Yorkshire, probably during the same summer the Picasso show opened. Diana had purchased some of Bacon’s design work, including a table and a rug. In Yorkshire, Diana found her cousin full of moody thoughts, the kind that keep young Heathcliffs awake at night, including “suicide, insanity and lust.”

It was probably the expiration of a two-year lease at Queensberry Mews that formally ended the period during which Bacon and Allden shared a flat. In December 1931, they were still together when Bacon wrote a chatty letter to his mother at Straffan Lodge: “We would simply adore a turkey and plum pudding as I shall be here for Christmas.” In the new year, however, the two went their separate ways. No doubt Eric Allden always knew that the young man with the big blue childish eyes would not live with him for very long. The pattern of Allden’s later life, and also of his life before Bacon, was to offer help to one promising young man after another. And there was always another young man of promise. Their separation was probably not especially difficult. Allden did not care for messes. Just a certain passing melancholy; fond memories; and then tea or an occasional drink with the dear boy.

Neither man turned his back on the other. They remained cordial for years. Allden eventually moved into a flat at 73 Egerton Gardens in Knightsbridge, almost directly across the street from the Brompton Oratory and a brief stroll from Harrods. He loyally placed his collection of works by Francis Bacon among his more traditional furniture—the watercolour of 1929; the gouache from the same year; the Lurcat-like painting of the tree by the sea that was included in the 1930 Queensberry Mews show. He also owned a Bacon rug and the three-panelled screen. In one carefully composed photograph of Allden, taken later in his life, he poses directly in front of the Bacon screen. In another, while seated on a couch above the Bacon rug, he wears a striped suit, a polka-dot tie, and a pocket handkerchief.