[6] From ages 5 to 8, Francis attended the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in London, and then at Eton College.
[citation needed] Haskell began his career not in academia but as a junior library clerk in the House of Commons from 1953 to 1954.
In 1967, he was elected Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford, where he remained until his retirement in 1995; the position made him, ex officio a visitor—that is, a trustee—of the Ashmolean Museum.
In 1976 Haskell, who often served on advisory committees for museum loan exhibitions, joined the National Art Collections Fund committee and became one of its most vocal members, defending the purchase of Poussin's Rebecca and Eliezar for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (the government refused to accept the painting because it had been in the collection of the disgraced Anthony Blunt).
Haskell's research focused beyond artworks to people that surrounded them, including their patrons and history of the academic study of art.
[6] His interest in the circumstances in which paintings were displayed, which reflected the esteem in which they were held and influenced the way they were perceived runs as a leitmotiv through his published work, beginning with an article jointly written with Michael Levey in Arte Veneta, 1958, that was devoted to art exhibitions in eighteenth-century Venice.