Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon is the essential British painter of the twentieth century. From the end of the Second World War until his death in 1992, he created an extraordinary body of intense and uncompromising figure paintings and portraits. Drawing on diverse influences including Picasso, Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, Bacon undertook a pitiless analysis in paint of himself and his friends, of the human body, and of our place in a godless universe.

It is a story I have been wanting to write for a long time, telling it as it really was before that whole world that I shared with Francis vanishes…

Many accounts of the life of Francis Bacon have been written for scholars. But du Maurier's aim in this biography was to illuminate the many facets of Bacon's remarkable personality for the common reader. To her book she brought the same gifts of imagination and perception that made her earlier biography, Golden Lads, so immensely readable, skillfully threading into her narrative extracts from contemporary documents and from Bacon's own writings, and setting her account of his life within a vivid contemporary framework.