British artist Francis Bacon is one of the best-known figurative painters of the 20th century. Notorious for his raw, unsettling imagery that conveys psychological states and turmoils, Bacon’s paintings capture the dark side of everyday life, through ambivalent and grotesque representations of animals and human figures. His brushstrokes merge multitudes of colors, spreading edges and disrupting the facial features of the characters involved.
Francis Bacon’s Early Works
Born to an English family in Dublin in 1909, Francis Bacon spent his childhood in Canny Court, County Kildare where his father worked as a racehorse trainer, allowing the artist to study animals from an early age. The family moved to London during the war years, where his father joined the Ministry of War, and the family spent postwar years between London and Ireland. After being kicked out of his family home for being a homosexual, at the age of 16, he spent his days in Berlin and Paris living off of his mother’s allowance.
During the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as an interior decorator. A late bloomer, Francis Bacon began to draw and paint in his late 20s inspired by Picasso’s 1927 exhibition he visited in Paris. His first exhibition held at his friend’s house, (renamed Transition gallery for the occasion), wasn’t received well and…
