Francis Bacon by Daniel Farson, 1953
1939-1944 Bacon’s asthma meant that he was pronounced unfit for active service in the Second World War. He did, however, volunteer for a role in Civil Defence where he worked in ARP (Air Raid Precautions), whose duties included fire-fighting, civilian rescue and the recovery of the dead. His asthma predictably worsened amidst the rubble-strewn streets and in 1942 he resigned. Somewhat unusually for a self-professed urbanite, he rented a cottage near Petersfield in Hampshire with Eric Hall. There he managed to work on at least one composition.
Bacon painted only sporadically during this period, but those works he did paint betray an increasingly recognisable manner. His experience of treading among the ruins of bombsites seems to have prompted a more concentrated and visceral imagery.
There were other channels of influence too. He was intrigued by the poems of T.S. Eliot, whose play The Family Reunion led him to a far richer source of ideas and sensations, The Oresteia by the ancient Greek dramatist, Aeschylus. He relished the evocative translations from the trilogy in W.B. Stanford’s Aeschylus in his Style, an academic study he bought soon after its publication in 1942. The Oresteia’s treatment of an ill-starred family trapped within a murderous cycle of revenge and guilt exerted a curious hold over the artist. It was no more than a year or two before its inspiration began to seep into his paintings.
In late 1943 Bacon moved into the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, a house once owned by the Pre-Raphaelite painter, John Everett Millais. Its cavernous moth-eaten grandeur provided an appropriate backdrop for an illicit casino run by Bacon and Lightfoot, with help from Eric Hall. It was in this space that Bacon completed a painting that finally launched his name, a work that unnerved its first audience.
