Francis Bacon painter: Encyclopedia II - Francis Bacon painter - The Millais House studio 7 Cromwell Place: 1943 - 1951

Francis Bacon painter - The Millais House studio 7 Cromwell Place: 1943 - 1951

Returning from Hampshire at the latter part of 1943, Bacon and Hall were to take the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, in John Everett Millais' old house and studio. The old studio, high vaulted and north lit, had had its roof blown in by a bomb, so Bacon adopted the enormous old billiard room at the back of the house for his studio. Nanny Lightfoot slept on the kitchen table as there was nowhere else. Illicit roulette parties were held there, organized by Bacon with the assistance of Eric Hall, and were a considerable financial success.

Now home to the National Art Collections Fund, Millais house is just a short walk from the Victoria and Albert Museum holding the National collection of paintings by John Constable, whose oil sketches were admired by Bacon. It was also at the V&A that Bacon would first discover and study the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge.

The April 1945 show Recent Paintings by Francis Bacon, Francis Hodgkins, Matthew Smith, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland at the Lefevre gallery (which was then on New Bond Street, London) had two paintings by Bacon - Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and Figure in a landscape (1945).

Francis Bacon painter - Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is a key precursor to Bacon's later themes: the triptych format, the placement behind glass in heavily gilded frames, the open mouth, and the use of painterly distortion; the Eumenides, or Furies, in the Oresteia of Aeschylus and the theme of the Crucifixion (Figures at the Foot of the Cross was the first attempt at the title).

Done in oil paint and pastel on Sundeala fibre board within the space of two weeks, Bacon considered Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) to be the true start to his oeuvre - his masterpiece in the original sense.

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) was presented to the Tate gallery by Eric Hall in 1953.

Untitled (1944) a variant of the right-hand panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) was shown at Francis Bacon: The Human Body, curated by David Sylvester, at the Hayward Gallery in 1998. A version of the left-hand panel: Study for a Figure (c.1944) was among the abandoned pictures in the 1964 catalogue raisonnè.

Francis Bacon painter - Figure in a landscape 1945

A photograph of Eric Hall dozing on a seat in Hyde Park was the basis of the other painting in the Lefevre show, Figure in a landscape (1945) which was bought by Diana Watson and, in 1950, by the Tate gallery (with the support of Graham Sutherland, then a trustee (1948 – 1954)).

Figure Study (1945) was destroyed, Figure Study I and Figure Study II are from 1945 or 1946.

Study for Man with Microphones (1946), was shown at the Lefevre gallery, (British Painters Past and Present July - August 1946), and at the Anglo-French Art Centre, (Seventh Exhibition November - December 1946). Bacon was clearly unhappy with this picture: it was listed as an abandoned work in the 1964 catalogue raisonnè, and was passed on to the Estate in 1992 as a slashed canvas.

At some point in 1947 - 1948, Bacon returned to make a second version, Study for Man with Microphones (1947-48) (shown February to March 1948, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Contemporary Painters (last (monochrome) plate in the catalogue by James Thrall Soby) as Study for Man with Microphones (1946); and from October to November 1962 in Francis Bacon at the Galleria d'Arte Galatea, Milan as Gorilla with Microphones (1945-46)).

Crucifixion (1933) (oil on canvas) was shown at the Summer Exhibition (July - September 1946) at the Redfern gallery, 19/20 Cork Street, London, and bought by Sir Colin Anderson.

Francis Bacon painter - Painting 1946

If Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is Bacon's masterpiece, then Painting (1946) has a good claim to be his Magnum opus. Originally to be a painting of a chimpanzee in long grass (parts of which may be still visible), he then attempted a bird of prey landing in a field. Bacon described it as his most unconscious^[8] work - the marks suddenly suggesting this image - at once magnificent and appalling.

- Excerpt from the October 1962 interview with David Sylvester for the BBC.

Graham Sutherland saw Painting (1946) in the Cromwell Place studio, and urged his dealer, Erica Brausen, then of the Redfern gallery, to go to see the painting and to buy it. Brausen wrote to Bacon several times, and visited his studio in early Autmn 1946 and promptly bought the work for £200. (Painting (1946) was shown in several group shows including in the British section of Exposition internationale d'arte moderne (18 November - 28 December 1946) at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, for which Bacon travelled to Paris.)

Within a fortnight of the sale of Painting (1946) to the Hanover gallery, with the proceeds, Bacon had decamped from London to Monte Carlo. After staying at a succession of hotels and flats, including the Hôtel de Ré, Bacon settled in a large villa, La Frontalière, in the hills above the town. Eric Hall and Nanny Lightfoot would come to stay. Bacon spent much of the next few years in Monte Carlo, short visits to London apart. From Monte Carlo, Bacon wrote to Graham Sutherland and Erica Brausen. His letters to Erica Brausen show that he did paint there but no paintings are known to survive.

In 1948, Painting (1946) finally sold to Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art, New York for £240. Bacon wrote to Sutherland asking that he apply fixative to the patches of pastel on Painting (1946) before it was shipped to New York. Painting (1946) is now too fragile to be moved from MoMA for exhibition elsewhere.

Francis Bacon painter - Head I Head II - Head VI

Bacon returned to London and Cromwell Place to paint, late in 1948. Head I was shown at the Summer exhibition at the Redfern gallery from July to September 1948.

By the end of 1948 Erica Brausen, who had advanced Bacon money, for works, left the Redfern gallery. Brausen had found private capital to start her own gallery in Mayfair. In the Spring a Bacon painting, presumably Head I, was shown at Erica Brausen's new Hanover gallery (and was noticed by Wyndham Lewis in an exhibition review of 12 May 1949).

Held from 8 November to 10 December 1949 at the Hanover gallery, Francis Bacon: Paintings; Robert Ironside: Coloured Drawings, was in effect, his first professional one-man show (Robert Ironside's watercolours were on an upper floor). A series of six paintings Head I to Head VI, with Study from the Human Body (1949) and Study for Portrait (1949) formed the core of the show with four other paintings by Bacon.

Bacon's paintings attracted the support of Wyndham Lewis writing in The Spectator.

Head I differs from Head II - Head VI in one important respect: while the first is painted on hardboard and dates from 1948 (or 1947-8), the rest of the series date from 1949 and are painted on the reverse of a (commercially) primed canvas.

- Excerpt from an interview with Melvyn Bragg in Francis Bacon (1985), for the 'South Bank Show' for London Weekend Television.

Head II is, for Bacon, very thickly painted, this was one of very few instances when he had been able to 'rescue' a painting after it had become overworked and the weave of the canvas clogged^[9] (as happened with two abandoned works on canvas from the Head series, from 1949, also in the 1949 Hanover show). The arrow, or pointer, motif in Head II is taken from the book Positioning in Radiography by Kathleen Clara Clark, 1939.

Head VI was Bacon's first surviving engagement with Velázquez's great Portrait of Pope Innocent X (three 'popes' were painted in Monte Carlo in 1946 but were destroyed). (The Cobalt Violet mozzetta, (Crimson in the Velázquez) may reflect Bacon's use of printed reproductions of the painting - Bacon later said that, although he admired "the magnificent colour" of the Velázquez, Velázquez "wanted to make it as much like a Titian as possible but, in a curious way he cooled Titian".)

In Francis Bacon by Robert Melville, in the December 1949 – January 1950 issue of Horizon magazine (edited by Cyril Connolly), Melville places Bacon in a European context, of painting, Picasso and Duchamp, but in a painterly rather than linear fashion, and of film, Eisenstein and, in particular, Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou. The piece was printed along with Reproductions of Paintings by Francis Bacon, between a short story by James Lord and an essay on the Marquis de Sade by Maurice Blanchot).

Francis Bacon painter - The Colony Room

The Colony Room, a private drinking club, at 41 Dean Street, Soho, also known as 'Muriel's' after Muriel Belcher, the formidable proprietress. Belcher, who had run a club called the Music-box in Leicester Square during the war, had secured a 3pm - 11pm drinking licence for the Colony Room bar as a private-members club (public houses had to close at 2.30pm). Bacon was a founding member, walking in the day after the opening in 1948. He was 'adopted' by Belcher as a 'daughter' and was allowed free drinks and £10 a week to bring in friends and rich patrons. It was here that Bacon became friends with Lady Rose McLaren.

Bacon met the painter and illustrator John Minton in 1948. Minton was soon to become a regular at 'Muriel's', as were the painters Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Timothy Behrens, Michael Andrews, and the two Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBride; and above all, the sometime Vogue photographer, John Deakin.

In 1950 Bacon met the art critic David Sylvester, then known for his writing on Henry Moore and praise for Alberto Giacometti's work. Sylvester had admired and written about his work (first writing about Bacon for a French periodical (L'Age nouveau) in 1948) but had erroneously perceived it to be a form of Expressionism. Head I, in particular, at the 1949 Hanover gallery show, was, for Sylvester, proof of Bacon's importance as a painter.

In September 1950, John Minton, left for the West Indies for a few months. Aware that Bacon was in need of the money, Minton asked him to take over his post as a tutor at the school of painting at the Royal College of Art. On condition that he did no formal teaching, Bacon agreed. So for three months, he was on hand to talk to the students for two days a week.

Painting (1950) and Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) were among the works shown at Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings; Hilly: Paintings, at the Hanover gallery, 14 September - 21 October 1950. Also Study for Figure (1950) (destroyed) and Man at a Curtain (1949) - an abandoned work.

Francis Bacon painter - Study after Velázquez

This series of three paintings after Velázquez were painted for the September 1950 Hanover gallery exhibition. The exhibition was advertised as Francis Bacon: Three Studies from the Painting of Innocent X by Velázquez but the series was withdrawn before the start of the show by Bacon.

In November 1950, after Bacon had gone off to South Africa, the Hanover gallery offered on his behalf Study after Velázquez (1950) to the Arts Council, for the Festival of Britain show Sixty Paintings for '51. On his return in May, Bacon again withdrew the painting before it was shown, although it is in the catalogue to the exhibition. Study after Velázquez (1950) and Study after Velázquez II (1950) were sent to his art supplier for the frames and stretchers to be reused. Bacon apparently believed them destroyed.

Study after Velázquez (1950) and Study after Velázquez II (1950) were rediscovered carefully rolled-up at Bacon's art supplier in September 1998 (and shown at the Tony Shafrazi gallery). Study after Velázquez II (1950) (also known as Untitled (Pope) (1950)) is an abandoned work. Study after Velázquez III (1950) is destroyed (but was photographed).

January 1951 Bacon was featured in World Review in The Iconoclasm of Francis Bacon by Robert Melville (describing Study after Velázquez (1950) seen at the studio and on the destruction of the three paintings in the series of studies after Velázquez; Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) and Man at a Curtain (1949) are shown in monochrome).

Painting (Head of a Man) (1950).

Untitled (Marching Figures). (c.1950) (on a stylistic basis it may be later, 1952 or 1953).

Study for Nude Figures (1950) (a.k.a. Untitled (Crouching Figure) (1950)), and Figure in Frame (1950) (a.k.a. Untitled (figure) (1950-1)), were among the abandoned paintings found in storage after the painter's death. Figure in Frame (1950), in particular, is a compellingly beautiful wreck. Thin dry-brushed paint on raw linen over a spectral smear and scrape of oil paint.

By 1950 Bacon's affair with Eric Hall had come to an end - he no longer appears on the electoral register with Bacon and Jessie Lightfoot at 7 Cromwell Place - but he was to remain a loyal patron, friend and supporter.

November 1950 Bacon visited his mother in South Africa. This suited his asthma better than spending Winter in London. Bacon was impressed by the African landscapes and wildlife, and took photographs in Kruger National Park. On his reurn journey he spent a few days in Cairo, and wrote to Erica Brausen of his intent to visit Karnak and Luxor, and then go via Alexandria to Marseilles. The visit confirmed his belief in the supremacy of Egyptian art, embodied by the Sphinx. He returned in the Spring of 1951.

30 April 1951 Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon's old nurse died at Cromwell Place. Bacon was gambling in Nice when he learnt of her death. Nanny Lightfoot, 'Nan', Bacon's closest companion, had joined him in London, on his return from Paris and had lived with him and Eric Alden at Queensberry Mews West, and with him and Eric Hall at the cottage near Petersfield, in Monte Carlo and at Cromwell Place. Stricken Bacon sold the 7 Cromwell Place apartment.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Millais House studio 7 Cromwell Place: 1943 - 1951", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki