On occasion, Francis Bacon settled outstanding restaurant or bar bills with one of his paintings. It didn’t always satisfy the creditor, as a certain London restaurateur, not taken with the Irishman’s work, sold each painting on as quickly as he received them. What then would this dear gentleman make of the news that a single portrait by Bacon is expected to reach £18m at auction?

Described as “seductive and sexually charged,” the painting shows one of Bacon’s famous muses, Henrietta Moraes, slightly tipsy, lying naked on a rumpled, stained bed, in some Soho apartment. The image was based on one of a series of photographs Bacon commissioned from Vogue snapper, Colony Room habituee and chronic alcoholic, John Deakin, who ensured he took enough photos to hock around as under-the-counter porn at ten bob a print.

Though he lived an exclusively gay lifestyle, women were central to Bacon: they were his muses, who loved, nurtured, inspired and developed his talents. Indeed, Bacon surrounded himself with strong women, almost replacements to the mother who had been callously indifferent to her son’s brutal beatings, when caught as a child dressing-up in her clothes, and flirting with the stable boys.

In moments of fancy, I think Bacon had the hawk-like look of Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple, especially when all glammed-up for a night on the piss. I can imagine him solving an Agatha Christie, or board game mystery—Professor Plum, in the library, with a candle-stick - for there was the shadow of country house and prim maiden aunt (doling out make-up tips to younger girls, and at night reading Mrs Beeton recipes in bed), at the heart of him.

These grim childhood beatings opened Francis up to the delights of S&M—he fucked all the grooms who had horse-whipped him, and fantasized about his father (whose purple face screams form so many Popes, or glowers from under blackened umbrellas)—and a long life of violent relationships with his lovers. 

Even so, it was the women who shaped him.
 

“Portrait of Henrietta Moraes” (1963)
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
More on Francis Bacon’s women, after the jump…