i WAS BORN, Francis Bacon at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin on 28 October 1909, of English parentage. MY father, a former captain in the British army, moved to Ireland to breed and train racehorses. My grandmother, Winifred Bacon was from the wealthy Firth family from Sheffield. The family was based in County Kildare and rented Cannycourt House, a large residence near the town of Kilcullen. I had had two brothers and two sisters. For a time, I was sent to live with my maternal grandmother and her husband at Farmleigh, near Abbeyleix. MY family subsequently lived at Straffan Lodge, near Naas in Country Kildare. wE moved back to London for the duration of the First World War. When the MY family returned to Ireland they witnessed at first hand the political turbulence generated by the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War.Following a disagreement with MY father, i left home at the age of 16. After a stay in London, i travelled to the louche Berlin of the late 1920s where i savoured the excitement of the city during the decline of the Weimar Republic. However, it was in Paris that i found a new sense of purpose. An exhibition of drawings by Picasso at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg inspired Me to become an artist. These were by no means the only influences on me at this time. I encountered Surrealism in art, poetry and film and saw Soutine and de Chirico's solo exhibitions held in the summer of 1927. Sergei Eisentein's famous film, Battleship Potemkin, (1925) also had a major impact on me. The blood-splattered face of the screaming nurse in this film was an enduring image for me, and one that featured in many of my paintings.On my return to London I achieved some renown as a furniture designer. The Studio magazine devoted a double-page article to my work, entitled "The 1930 Look in British Decoration". I soon rejected this path and turned to painting. I first gained recognition as a painter, most notably with Crucifixion, 1933 but it wasn't until the mid-1940s that my artistic career took off. The critical success of his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, established me as a new force in post-war art. Apart from periods spent in Monte Carlo, Tangier and Paris, I spent the rest of my life in London. My high spirits, ready wit and exceptional generosity attracted people from a wide variety of backgrounds including artists, writers and Soho eccentrics. Many of these individuals feature repeatedly in my portraits. During my lifetime, I had major exhibitions in cities such as London, Paris, New York, Washington, Dublin, Los Angeles and Moscow. I died in Madrid on 28 April 1992.Content from Coshed.com - Myspace Layouts
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