Francis Bacon
Screaming popes, triptychs, and a studio floor he refused to let anyone tidy.
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909, thrown out of the family home as a teenager, and worked as an interior decorator before painting seriously. He had no formal training. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, shown in London in 1945, arrived as the war ended and made his name at once. What followed was fifty years of the same concerns: the human figure isolated in a glass cage or a bare room, the papal portraits after Velazquez, and the great triptychs, many of them addressed to George Dyer, who died in Paris in 1971 on the eve of Bacon's Grand Palais retrospective. He worked at Reece Mews in South Kensington in conditions of legendary disorder until 1992.
Bacon destroyed a great deal of his own work and disowned more, so what survives is finite and heavily documented. The catalogue raisonne published by the Estate in 2016 is the reference, and a work absent from it needs explaining. He insisted his paintings be glazed and framed to his specification, and original frames are part of the object rather than packaging. Prints, mostly lithographs and etchings after paintings, were editioned in his lifetime and are a separate and much larger market.
If you own a work by Francis Bacon
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.