Francis Bacon was born on the 28^th of October 1909 to English parents. His father was a major in the British army and had moved to Ireland to train racehorses. His mother was from a wealthy family, which owned many large Dublin Georgian houses. At the age of sixteen, Bacon was forced to leave the familial house.

He went first to London, then to Berlin and Paris. In Paris he was inspired by a Picasso exhibit to become an artist. He also discovered the surrealism art movement. During the summer of 1927, he saw Soutine and de Chirico's solo exhibitions. Sergei Eisentein's Battleship Potemkin, (1925) had a major impact on Bacon. The blood-splattered face of the screaming nurse in this film was an enduring image and one that featured in many of his paintings, most significantly in Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope, 1952.

He first gained recognition as a painter, most notably with Crucifixion, 1933 but it wasn't until the mid-1940s that his artistic career took off. Francis Bacon never went to art school, but during these years experimented with the current French artistic avant-garde as his model. He was excused from military service on account of his asthma, but World War II had nonetheless a galvanizing effect on him.

Francis Bacon always resisted every trend and fashion in art to hack out a path of his own. Though shaped by such old masters as Rembrandt, Velasquez and Daumier, he has been as much influenced by the immediacy of the photograph as by anything else. War, terrorism, gory accidents - these fleeting instants of agony fascinate Bacon. A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object ; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is the struggle with the object.
--Francis Bacon Considered by many as one of the most talented British painters, his lack of formal training became a tremendous advantage. Uninhibited by drawing skills or rules of composition, he painted simply for effect. This recipe for disaster served him well. His early paintings, from the 1940s, look cramped and underdeveloped, as though bred in captivity. This is their great quality.

In real life, Bacon was as mysterious as he was on canvas. Keeping one step ahead of his landlords, he moved about London so much that one was never sure where he could be found. In the 1950s he lived in Tangier and in Monte Carlo, but in both cases, he found the light too strong to paint comfortably. From 1961 he had several studios in the South Kensington area of London, each with problems concerning light. He was able to paint better in London than in Paris, and, although he wanted his home to be clean, he was also most happy working in utter chaos. He lived with his elderly, eccentric nanny who slept on the kitchen table during the day.

For the last thirty years of his life he lived in a bathtub-in-the-kitchen flat with paint tubes on the floor and trial brushstrokes on the walls. He carried around a wad of bills, wore the same black turtlenecks and drank in seedy bars. He worked not only with brushes but also with rags, rakes and sprays. He sometimes squeezed tubes of paint into his palm, flinging the paint at the canvas with one gesture of his hand. Though he used many of the instinctual techniques of the ‘action painters’, he did not like abstract art. A compulsive perfectionist, he destroyed more of his paintings than he finished. Bacon by his own admission was obsessed with death.

Bacon is renowned as Britain's finest figurative painter. His works have hung in United States museums since the early 1950s. His commercial success is a telling comment on just how open-minded the general public has become, for Bacon's material is, to put it simply, sick. He made no bones about the fact that the obsessive subject of his paintings was homosexual despair. He argued, however, that the despair he has observed among heterosexuals amounted to more or less the same thing. To capture the feverish, nightmarish quality of the experience, he developed to perfection what is at its core a surrealist dream style.