Bacon's Women

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is still widely seen as the great painter of masculine anguish: the bars and the brutality, the writhing male bodies and the screaming popes. Yet this portrayal of Bacon, so often repeated, misses a crucial truth. Women were not marginal to his life or work. They were central.

In Bacon’s Women, leading Bacon scholar Michael Peppiatt overturns decades of critical habit to reveal the women who shaped Bacon’s emotional world and sustained his practice. From portrait to portrait of Bacon’s closest female friends, Peppiatt shows how Bacon’s relationships with women informed not only his private life but also his working methods and his sense of self. Drawing on thirty years of friendship with Bacon, as well as newly published letters and interviews, Peppiatt introduces us to the formidable women who stood at key junctures in the painter’s life, from his irrepressible grandmother and wildly eccentric nanny onwards: the discerning collectors and gallerists who enabled his early survival, the muses and society hostesses who challenged him intellectually and emotionally, and the confidantes who lived through his excesses and vulnerabilities when male friends fell away.

Long treated as footnotes, personalities such as Nanny Lightfoot and Granny Supple, Erica Brausen and Valerie Beston, Yvonne Bocquentin and Lisa Sainsbury, Muriel Belcher and Sonia Orwell emerge here as decisive, irreplaceable influences.