He said that he saw images "in series", and his work, which numbers in the region of 590 extant paintings along with many others he destroyed,[1] typically focused on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats.

His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition.

Following the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971 (memorialised in his Black Triptychs, and a number of posthumous portraits), his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death.

A bon vivant, he spent his middle age eating, drinking and gambling in London's Soho with like-minded friends including Lucian Freud (although they fell out in the mid-1970s, for reasons neither ever explained), John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Daniel Farson, Tom Baker and Jeffrey Bernard.

After Dyer's suicide, he largely distanced himself from this circle, and while still socially active and his passion for gambling and drinking continued, he settled into a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards.

In the late 1990s, a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed,[3] including early 1950s pope paintings and 1960s portraits, re-emerged to set record prices at auction.

They lived in Cannycourt House in County Kildare from 1911,[7] later moving to Westbourne Terrace in London, close to where Bacon's father worked at the Territorial Force Records Office.

[10] His poor health meant his formal education was sporadic; he received lessons at home from a private tutor, and from 1924 to 1926 attended Dean Close, a boarding school in Cheltenham.

Later that year, Bacon was thrown out of Straffan Lodge following an incident in which his father found him admiring himself in front of a large mirror wearing his mother's underwear.

He was sacked from a telephone-answering position at a shop selling women's clothes in Poland Street in Soho after writing a poison pen letter to the owner.

Bacon found himself drifting through London's homosexual underworld, aware that he was able to attract a certain type of rich man, something he was quick to take advantage of, having developed a taste for good food and wine.

He took a studio at 17 Queensberry Mews West, South Kensington, sharing the upper floor with Eric Allden – his first collector – and his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot.

These and the scene with the nurse screaming on the Odessa steps from the Battleship Potemkin later became recurrent parts of Bacon's iconography, with the angularity of Eisenstein's images often combined with the thick red palette of his recently purchased medical tome.

In 1936 or 1937 Bacon moved from 71 Royal Hospital Road to the top floor of 1 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which Eric Hall had rented..[2] In January 1937, at Thomas Agnew and Sons, 43 Old Bond Street, London, Bacon exhibited in a group show, Young British Painters, which included Graham Sutherland and Roy De Maistre.

An ancestor to the biomorphic form of the central panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), the composition was suggested by a photograph of Hitler getting out of a car at one of the Nuremberg rallies.

After staying at a succession of hotels and flats, including the Hôtel de Ré, Bacon settled in a large villa, La Frontalière, in the hills above the town.

He kept an extensive inventory of images for source material, but preferred not to confront the major works in person; he viewed Portrait of Innocent X only once, much later in his life.

Bacon's artistic inclinations in the 1950s moved towards his abstracted figures which were typically isolated in geometrical cage-like spaces, and set against flat, nondescript backgrounds.

[35] Although his decisions might have been driven by the fact that in the 1950s he tended to produce group works for specific showings, usually leaving things until the last minute, there is a significant development in his aesthetic choices during this period which influenced his preference for the represented content in his paintings.

[citation needed] On 30 April 1951, Jessie Lightfoot, his childhood nanny, died at Cromwell Place; Bacon was gambling in Nice when he learned of her death.

His previous lover, Peter Lacy, had a reputation for tearing up Bacon's paintings, beating him in drunken rages, and at times leaving him on streets half-conscious.

His compact and athletic build belied a docile and inwardly tortured personality, although the art critic Michael Peppiatt describes him as having the air of a man who could "land a decisive punch".

Withdrawn and reserved when sober, Dyer was highly animated and aggressive when drunk, and often attempted to "pull a Bacon" by buying large rounds and paying for expensive dinners for his wide circle.

[58] In 1998 the director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin secured Edwards' and Clarke's donation of the contents of Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington.

[66] Bacon's series of Popes, largely quoting Velázquez's famous Portrait of Innocent X (1650, Galeria Doria Pamphili, Rome), are striking images which further develop motifs already found in his earlier works, like the Study for Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, such as the screaming open mouth.

[67] The inspiration for the recurring motif of screaming mouths in many Bacons of the late 1940s and early 1950s was drawn from a number of sources, including medical textbooks.

[68] He also used the works of Matthias Grünewald[69] and photographic stills of the nurse in the Odessa Steps scene in Eisenstein's 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin.

He kept in his studio a photographic still of the scene, showing a close-up of the nurse's head screaming in panic and terror and with broken pince-nez spectacles hanging from her blood-stained face.

In 2007, actress Sophia Loren consigned Study for Portrait II (1956) from the estate of her late husband Carlo Ponti at Christie's.

[76] In 1999, England's High Court ruled that Marlborough Fine Art, Bacon's former gallery, had to be replaced by a new, independent representative for the administration of the estate.