Lucian Freud’s first drawings of Francis Bacon

Perhaps more than those of any other figures in 20th-century British art, the careers of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are inextricably linked; their intimate friendship — and infamous falling out — resulting in an extraordinary and unique body of work.

The importance of Bacon and Freud’s joint legacy to the market was established beyond question in 2013 when Christie’s sold Bacon’s 1969 painting, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, for $142.2 million in New York — then the most expensive work of art ever auctioned. This October, Christie’s is offering two drawings from 1951, this time by Freud of Bacon, which instead chart the beginning of the duo’s fascination with depicting one another.

Bacon and Freud were introduced in 1945 by the painter Graham Sutherland, when he invited them both to stay at his country home. The two travelled together on the train from London’s Victoria station, quickly striking up a rapport centred on a shared love of bohemian Soho, at the time a square mile in the city centre dedicated to drinking, gambling and sex.

Born in Dublin in 1909, Bacon didn’t take up painting professionally until he was in his late twenties. Freud, who was 13 years younger than his companion, had arrived in London as a child in 1933, fleeing from Nazi Berlin. By the time the pair became acquainted, both were beginning to forge their careers with solo exhibitions in London’s Mayfair and St. James’s galleries.

Artistically, Bacon and Freud were equally committed to the human figure. But while Bacon had a reputation for working quickly, often using photographs as a pictorial springboard, Freud worked slowly — notoriously demanding months of his sitter’s time — and painted exclusively from life.

Freud was nevertheless inspired by Bacon’s impulsive painterly language, once saying, ‘He talked about packing a lot of things into a single brushstroke, which amused and excited me, and I realised that it was a million miles away from anything I could ever do.’ Bacon, on the other hand, appreciated his companion’s disarming charm.

Between daily lunches at Wheeler’s oyster bar, drinks at the Gargoyle Club and the Colony Room Club, and frequent bouts of gambling, the two quickly became inseparable. As Freud’s wife at the time, Lady Caroline Blackwood, would later recall, ‘I had dinner with [Bacon] nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to Lucian. We also had lunch.’

The pair saw each other nearly every day for 25 years and, naturally for two painters with a preference for representing people they knew, Freud and Bacon eventually became each other's artistic subjects.

Bacon first painted Freud in 1951 in a work now hanging in Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery of Art. Freud returned the favour just months later at his home in St. John’s Wood, north London. The result was a series of three affectionate pencil sketches, two of which are those being offered at Christie’s.

The art critic William Feaver, a longtime friend of Freud’s who curated a number of exhibitions of his work, recorded an account of the evening: ‘Freud drew [Bacon] three times in [a] catwalk pose: three sketches latching on to the quips of body language that Bacon was so brilliant at swiping from newspaper photos and the like. Bared hips, the deferential nape of a neck, flinching eye contact, the inertia of despair or deep sleep were Bacon's forte; for Freud such inroads of vision and expression were enticing potential.’

These drawings, unseen in public until 2011, marked the beginning of the reciprocal portrait practice that has come to define Bacon and Freud’s relationship. They bear witness to Freud’s skill as a draughtsman, his calligraphic lines and analytical detail here reaching the peak of their development.

The drawings were acquired directly from Freud in the 1950s by the Irish collector the Late Hon. Garech Domnagh Browne (1939-2018), the younger cousin of Lady Caroline Blackwood, in whose collection they have remained ever since. 

Browne, who would later become a great patron of Celtic music and poetry, was a member of the extended Guinness family who became custodian of the historic Luggala estate in the Wicklow mountains in 1970. Through his family’s eclectic artists’ salon, he met Freud while still a young boy. It was via Freud that Browne was then introduced to Bacon, and by extension, the thrills of 1950s Soho.

‘We had lunch with Francis, Caroline Blackwood and Lucian in Wheeler’s restaurant with my mother,’ Browne would recall. ‘We would then proceed to the Colony Club, where the proprietress Muriel Belcher, one of the three known women Bacon ever painted, told me I was the only member ever allowed in under the age of 12. Later, Lucian would take me to the Gargoyle Club... I would not be allowed in by the bouncers, so Lucian would put me under his long overcoat and I walked on his feet to gain entry. Many of the inmates were to be painted by both Francis and Lucian.’

The following year Freud would paint Bacon for the first time in a work originally intended for the wall at Wheeler’s. The painting was instead acquired soon after it was completed by the Tate collection, and subsequently stolen from the walls of Freud’s 1988 retrospective in Berlin. The closely cropped, sullen portrait — the only complete oil painting of Bacon that Freud ever made — hasn’t been seen since.

Freud would later recount how he and Bacon sat knee to knee for almost three months until the painting was finished. ‘Everyone thought of him as a blur; but he had a very specific face. I remember wanting to bring Bacon out from behind the blur. I wanted to know him not just as an art-world person, but... as a friend I suppose. I have often painted people because I want to know them.’

The art critic Robert Hughes compared Bacon's face in that painting to a grenade just before it explodes. Freud, less extravagantly, said that ‘I was pleased with it, and he seemed to like it as well’. The pair often scrutinised each other’s work. As Bacon put it, ‘Who can I tear to pieces, if not my friends? If they were not my friends, I could not do such violence to them.’

Bacon sat again for Freud in 1956, although that work — the only surviving oil painting of Bacon by Freud — was never finished. Nine years later Bacon revived the tradition, painting a diptych of Freud and Frank Auerbach. (That picture now hangs in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.) Bacon painted Freud again that same year in a large-scale triptych now distributed between the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; and a private collection.

‘Of all the portraits I can think of, the ones Bacon made of Lucian Freud in the mid 1960s are among the most painful,’ said the art critic Charles Darwent of the rawness of Bacon’s depictions of Freud from this era. ‘What Bacon saw when he looked at the famously beautiful Freud was his own loathsomeness reflected.’ 

By the second half of the 1960s each artist’s output was reaching fever pitch. Freud painted Bacon’s lover George Dyer on a number of occasions, while Bacon painted Freud a further 14 times between 1964 and 1971.

The 1969 work Three Studies of Lucian Freud, however — sold for $142.4 million by Christie’s in 2013 — signalled the beginning of the end of the pair’s volatile friendship. Whether due to an increasing artistic rivalry, or Bacon’s fragile mental health following George Dyer’s suicide in 1971, the pair’s relationship disintegrated. Neither ever disclosed why, but to many observers, the highly strung and argumentative temperaments of both artists made an eventual rupture inevitable.

In 2018, just weeks before All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life  opened at London’s Tate Modern, a series of recordings from 1982 surfaced in which Bacon blasted Freud’s latest works as ‘ridiculous’, and lamented how his former friend refused to see him or return his artworks. Freud, in retaliation, said the feeling was entirely mutual, calling Bacon’s newest pictures ‘ghastly’.

Still, despite publicly rejecting each other’s friendship, Freud would keep an early Bacon painting called Two Figures  (1953) on his bedroom wall for most of his life, saying of it, ‘I’ve been looking at it for a long time now, and it doesn’t get worse. It really is extraordinary.’ Similarly, shortly before his death in Madrid in 1992, Bacon described the end of his relationship with Freud as ‘rather sad’.

Today their lives and work remain tied in the public imagination, as well as on the art market. Like all good artistic rivalries, Freud and Bacon have unwittingly shaped one another’s careers in both life and death.