Read Time:7 Minute, 24 Second

By William Van Zyl

Published on July 7, 2025

John carefully lifts a half-full tube of oil paint. He reads out the colour on the aluminium casing, “Burnt Sienna.” John looks at the incomplete painting to his left; he wants to match the colour to the painting. He looks at the incomplete image—the face of a man screaming—and then his eyes focus on the tube of paint in his hand. In his mind, he wants to complete the painting. However, the image on the canvas is too chaotic for him.

IMAGE: Painting Title: Head III 1961. By Francis Bacon. Head III (1961) is a haunting and visceral painting by Francis Bacon, part of his ongoing exploration of the human condition. The work features a distorted, almost ghost-like head enclosed within a cage-like structure—one of Bacon’s signature motifs. With raw brushstrokes and unsettling intensity, the painting conveys themes of isolation, psychological torment, and existential angst. Like much of Bacon’s work, Head III blurs the line between humanity and animality, capturing the fragility and violence inherent in the human experience. Credit image: Libby Rosof (Flickr). Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/libbyrosof/3059846900

Credit: Flickr. Francis Bacon | Three Studies for the Portait of Henrietta M… | Flickr

He carefully cuts a piece of masking tape from a large roll, wraps it around the tube, and takes a vivid marker and writes the number on the tube: ”6591.” Several extensive paper plan views are laid out on the floor of the studio, resembling a painting-by-number exercise.

IMAGE: Francis Bacon’s Studio in Dublin. Credit Lisax92. Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/42684812@N08/10172375696/in/photostream/

IMAGE: Bacon’s Studio. See the mirror in the centre of the photo. Francis would place his completed painting behind him and look at his work in the mirror in front of him. Francis had a person come in to clean his apartment from time to time. However, he stopped the cleaner from entering his studio. Photo taken by Erin Williamson on September 6, 2009. Credit Flickr (Erin Williamson). Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/erinwilliamson/4288949430

A total of about 7,000 items are documented from Francis Bacon’s London studio at 7 Reece Mews. The exceptionally shaped cases and bags are marked: “To: Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.” Three carpenters are carefully removing the wall panels of the studio. They mark the wall panels and ceiling boards and place the panels on special trolleys. Paper tag dangles from the dusty boards. A large brown cockroach sits on one of the tags, trying to read the note on the paper: “Northern wall panel, lower right, number 4.”

“Scoop the dust off the floor and place it into the white plastic bag,” said the leading carpenter.

“Here is a dead moth, and some ants, in the dust.”

“Scoop them up. Don’t leave anything behind.”

The second carpenter scoops up the small heap of dust, including the insects, and places it into the pristine, clean plastic bag.

“Make a mental note, write a note on the bag, and remember exactly where the dust goes,” said the lead carpenter.

“I feel like a forensic investigator on a murder case,” says the carpenter laughingly through his dust mask.

They both burst into laughter, their goggles fogging up with each breath. They chuckled sinisterly like visitors from another planet, dressed in white, dustproof vinyl.

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This extraordinary relocation project includes over 1,500 photographs, around 100 slashed canvases, 70 drawings, Hundreds of books, notes, newspapers, and art materials. Even the walls, floor, ceiling, door, and dust were transported and reconstructed exactly as they had been.

Several team members are bent over the piles of art supplies in the studio. They are carefully cataloguing all the items of Bacon. With gloves and clipboards in hand, they document every tube of paint, each incomplete canvas, paintbrush, scribbled note, tattered easel—even the layers of dust coating the floor are painstakingly numbered.

Nothing is too insignificant. Their mission? To relocate the entire contents of Bacon’s legendary London studio—chaotic, cluttered, and completely authentic—into a museum space that would mirror it down to the last speck of grime. The original wall panels, splattered with decades of creative frenzy, are being pried from the room and numbered like ancient ruins. This is no ordinary studio; it belonged to Francis Bacon, one of the most influential—and untidiest—painters of the 20th century.

END OF THE INTRODUCTION.

IMAGE: ‘Head VI’ is the earliest surviving example of the almost 50 variants of Velázquez’s ‘Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ that Bacon painted, and the final in his series of ‘Heads’. The Pope’s vestments are suggested with cursory strokes of paint. At the same time, a black curtain seems to carry away the top of the head, transforming Velázquez’s Pope from an intelligent, ageing man into a howling figure who elicits pity as much as fear.

[Royal Academy]. From the exhibition

Francis Bacon: Man and Beast

(January — April 2022. Credit Flickr. Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/11561957@N06/52191399291

Painting by Bacon. Credit: Flickr.

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Born in 1909 in Dublin, Ireland, Francis Bacon led a life as raw and unfiltered as his artwork.

Self-taught, restless, and controversial, Bacon broke away from conventional beauty and dove into the grotesque, the visceral, and the brutally honest. His work often depicted distorted human forms—screaming mouths, twisted flesh, and solitary figures—all drenched in emotional intensity and psychological depth. He once famously described his goal as capturing “the brutality of fact.”

Bacon’s life was not only painted in chaos—it was lived in it. His London studio at 7 Reece Mews became an extension of his mind: frenzied, unpredictable, layered with years of abandoned ideas and accidental genius. The studio floor was littered with crumpled photos, newspapers, and open books; shelves overflowed with pigment pots and brushes jammed into paint-splattered jars. Bacon worked amid the mess, claiming it helped stimulate his imagination.

Following his death in 1992, curators and historians faced an enormous task: preserving this rare artistic ecosystem. Over 7,000 items were catalogued and meticulously transported to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where the studio was reassembled piece by piece. The result is a haunting, powerful recreation of a space where chaos gave birth to some of modern art’s most unforgettable images.

Today, visitors stand in awe before the studio, peering into the heart of disorder that gave rise to Bacon’s disturbingly beautiful canvases. “The World’s Messiest Artist” may sound like a nickname fit for ridicule, but in Francis Bacon’s case, it was the crucible of genius.

More about Francis Bacon:

Photo of Francis Bacon (by Peter Beard). Link: Credit – Flickr by kute (https://www.flickr.com/photos/unknownpeople/63318088/in/photol

IMAGE: Self-portrait by Bacon. Credit, cea+ (Flickr).

Irish-born artist Francis Bacon, the son of a horse breeder, emerged as one of the most significant and influential painters of the 20th century.

Openly gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal, Bacon was cast out of his conservative family home by his father at just 16. He spent his early years drifting through Berlin and Paris before eventually settling in London—a city that would become central to his artistic life. These formative experiences unfolded against the backdrop of some of the century’s most turbulent and traumatic events, shaping both the man and his art.

This compelling exhibition explores Bacon’s profound fascination with animals and how it influenced his often-distorted portrayals of the human form. His figures—captured in moments of extreme emotion or existential crisis—appear suspended between human and beast, their forms twisted and barely recognisable.

Bacon was obsessed with animal movement. He studied wildlife during travels to South Africa, filled his notoriously chaotic studio with books on animal behaviour, and regularly referenced Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century motion studies. From chimpanzees and bulls to dogs and birds of prey, Bacon believed that observing the raw, instinctive actions of animals could reveal unsettling truths about the human condition.

Spanning five decades of his work, this exhibition brings together some of Bacon’s earliest paintings, his final masterpiece, and—shown together for the first time—a striking trio of bullfight paintings that exemplify his lifelong exploration of primal form and feeling.

Credit: Royal Academy of Arts