A Distorted Portrait of Francis Bacon Quiz

Answer: True

The younger Francis Bacon's great-grandfather, Anthony Bacon, who was a British cavalry officer and was a hero of the Battle of Waterloo, claimed to be a descendant of Sir Nicholas Bacon, elder half-brother of Sir Francis Bacon, the famous Elizabethan philosopher and essayist who had a seminal influence on the development of the scientific method.

The elder Francis Bacon had no children and so has no direct descendants.

Answer: Velazquez

Spanish painter Diego Velázquez painted his famous portrait of Pope Innocent X from real life, and it has been hailed as the finest portrait ever made. The painting was a major influence on Bacon, and his most famous work featuring the pope is "Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X." In contrast to the careful realism of Velazquez, Bacon's painting shows its subject in a highly distorted, nightmarish manner.

The painting contains several recurring themes from Bacon's work, such as the screaming mouth, and vertical lines that seem to form a cage-like structure surrounding the subject, who is portrayed against a dark background.

Answer: John Everett Millais

Bacon moved into the apartment with Eric Hall, a wealthy businessman, who was Bacon's partner from about 1932 to 1949, as well as his patron for many years. They were accompanied by Jessie Lightfoot, his former family nanny with whom he maintained a close relationship until her death in 1951. Bacon adapted a large old billiard room at the back as his studio. Bacon, who was fond of gambling held many illegal roulette parties in the apartment, with the help of Hall, at which Lightfoot would act as a hat-check girl. John Everett Millais was a major nineteenth century English painter who was a founder of a loose-knit artistic movement called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

It is unclear whether Bacon drew any inspiration from Millais' work though. Bacon sold the apartment shortly after Lightfoot's death, which was traumatic for him, although later in life he said that he regretted this decision.

Answer: His asthma

Bacon suffered from chronic asthma all his life and this disqualified him from military service. He did volunteer to work in Air Raid Precautions, which included such duties as fire-fighting, civilian rescue and recovering the dead. However, working in the rubble-strewn streets aggravated his asthma and he resigned from this post in 1943. Commentators on Bacon's work have suggested that having asthma may have influenced some of the recurring visual themes in his paintings.

For example, depictions of figures enclosed in claustrophobic spaces with screaming mouths may be an expression of the feeling of being unable to breathe.

Answer: The Oresteia

"The Oresteia" was a series of three plays by the ancient Greek dramatist, Aeschylus. In one of the plays, the protagonist Orestes is commanded by Apollo to avenge the murder of his father Agamemnon by his mother Clytemnestra, by killing her in turn. For committing this blood crime, he is tortured by a trio of Greek goddesses called the Furies.

While not his first painting, Bacon regarded "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" as his first important work. A most unsettling painting, it depicts three writhing anthropomorphic creatures set against a flat burnt orange background.

It was first shown at a joint exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, London, in April 1945; it caused a sensation and was responsible for establishing his reputation as a major modern painter.

After re-reading Aeschylus, Bacon returned to the themes he explored in this early painting in 1981 when he painted "Triptych Inspired by Oresteia of Aeschylus." He said of this painting that he tried, "to create images of the sensations that some of the episodes created inside me."

Answer: Battleship Potemkin

Bacon saw this film in 1935 and rewatched it frequently. The final act of the film features an atrocity in which soldiers begin firing mercilessly on a crowd of unarmed civilians including women and children. The specific image of the screaming nurse is a close-up of her head screaming in panic, with broken glasses hanging from her blood-stained face. Bacon kept a photographic still of this image in his studio and it acted as a source of his inspiration for his famous series of paintings of screaming popes in particular.

Answer: While Dyer was breaking into Bacon's apartment

Although George Dyer was a petty criminal, the story that he met Bacon while breaking into his house is completely untrue. Despite this, the story was dramatized in the 1998 film, "Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon," a fictional biography of the artist's life. Bacon actually met Dyer in a Soho pub in 1963 when the latter offered to buy him a drink. Dyer was a major influence on Bacon's work and was the subject of many portraits.

As much as he admired Bacon and enjoyed the attention he received from featuring in his work, Dyer described his lover's paintings as "reely 'orrible." Sadly, Dyer was a troubled man and an alcoholic, and died of an overdose of barbiturates in 1971. Bacon was deeply affected by Dyer's death, and painted "The Black Triptychs," a series of three works that show views from moments before, during and after Dyer's suicide, between 1972 and 1974.

Answer: Freud

Lucian Freud is today regarded as one of the foremost 20th-century portrait painters. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and was the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Bacon and Freud were close friends from 1944 until about 1985, although they later had a bitter falling out for unknown reasons. Lady Caroline Blackwood, who was married to Freud from 1952 to 1959, stated that she remembered having dinner with Bacon 'nearly every day' for the duration of her marriage. Bacon painted about 16 portraits of Freud, the most famous of which is "Three Studies of Lucian Freud," painted in 1969.

This work sold in November 2013 for US$142.4 million, which at the time was the highest price attained at auction for a work of art when not factoring in inflation. Freud also painted a portrait of Bacon, which was stolen from the traveling exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin in 1988. Shortly before his death in 1992, Bacon described the end of their friendship as "rather sad."

Answer: Tom Baker

The Colony Room was a private establishment that ran from 1948 to 2008. The proprietor, Muriel Belcher, known as "mother," adopted Francis Bacon as a "daughter" and he was allowed free drinks and £10 a week to bring in friends and rich patrons. Among the more famous regular patrons were actors Peter O'Toole and John Hurt, as well as Bacon's friend and fellow painter Lucian Freud. Tom Baker, who starred in the TV show "Doctor Who" from 1974 to 1981, mentions drinking with Bacon there in a 1978 interview that was published under the title "A Life in the Day of Tom Baker" in the Sunday Times Magazine.

Answer: Mick Jagger

Bacon generally preferred to paint portraits of people he was intimately familiar with, such as close friends and lovers. Although he did not know Jagger personally and was not a big fan of rock and roll, he may have been persuaded to accept the commission by a mutual friend named Peter Beard.

The painting, "Three Studies for a Portrait (Mick Jagger)," is a triptych consisting of three images of Jagger's head cut off at the neck against a bright orange background. Although the images are notably distorted, especially in the mouth area, they are readily recognisable as Jagger. For the painting, following his usual practice, he relied solely on photographic material, rather than live sittings. Additionally, Bacon had many books on the Rolling Stones and Jagger, such as "The Rolling Stones: An Illustrated Record" and "Mick Jagger in His Own Words," in his studio. Andrew Sinclair, the author of a biography of Bacon, commented on the painting thus: "The beauty of the rock singer's bone structure and the sensuality of his mouth are shown with love and care, while only maroon stripes over the eyes suggest the fury and the force of his performance."