Room 2
Francis Bacon 1952
Freud first met fellow-painter Francis Bacon in 1945, when both went to stay for the weekend with another painter,
Graham Sutherland.
Freud said of Bacon 'Once I met him I saw him a lot'; he became the person Freud turned to for stimulus and provocation.
Bacon painted a portrait of Freud in 1951, working not in front of his subject but using a photo of the writer Franz Kafka,
whose work Freud admires.
In the following year, Freud painted Bacon's portrait in oils on a small copper plate, sitting so close to his subject that
their knees touched.
This portrait was stolen in 1988 when it was on loan from the Tate to a gallery in Berlin.
Freud drew the study of Bacon shown here one evening at his home in Clifton Hill, St John's Wood.
The two painters remained friends until the late 1970s. |
