Francis Bacon photographed by Cecil Beaton in his Battersea studio, 1959, © Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Sotheby's
1958-1963 What followed was a period of transition. He signed a contract in October 1958 with Marlborough Fine Art after its directors had offered to take on the considerable debt of £1,242 he then owed to the Hanover Gallery. Bacon respected the eye of Marlborough’s co-founder Frank Lloyd, and his day-to-day affairs were handled by the gallery’s Valerie Beston.
Three years later, in 1961, he took over 7 Reece Mews, a converted coach house in South Kensington, just around the corner from his old studio at Cromwell place. The first floor studio was to be the most important room in the artist’s life. Over the years it became an overwhelmingly cluttered space with vibrant daubs and accretions of paint on the walls and doors. Its layers of dust, debris and toxic pigments could only have exacerbated his chronic asthma and its East-West orientation was never ideal. In later life, despite occasionally acquiring new and more spacious places to work, he always returned to this awkward but familiar room. The studio became Bacon’s complete visual world. Its heaps of torn photographs, fragments of illustrations and artist’s catalogues provided nearly all of his visual sources. He had all but given up painting from life.
Within months of moving into Reece Mews, he produced his first large-scale triptych, Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962 (198.2 × 144.8 cm). He readily admitted that it was painted during an unusually booze-fueled fortnight, a working method that rarely delivered results, but in this case liberated him. Throughout the next three decades Bacon used large-scale triptychs to address some of his grandest and most ambitious subjects.
Three Studies for a Crucifixion was included along with 90 other works in a major retrospective at the Tate Gallery in May that year. The show established his preeminence among contemporary British painters but also marked a time of personal loss. On the opening day, amidst telegrams of congratulation, one message informed him of the death of Peter Lacy in Tangiers. He had parted company with Lacy some years before, and his death from drink had not been difficult to predict, yet Bacon was nonetheless deeply affected. In 1963 he painted the dark and ambiguous Landscape near Malabata, Tangier in memory of Lacy’s final resting place.
