Francis Bacon’s Studio
One of the most important artistic spaces in Britain
Francis Bacon moved to 7 Reece Mews in 1961 and worked there until the day he died. The tiny mews studio – sloping ceiling, north-facing skylight, floor thick with paint and torn photographs and squashed tubes – became one of the most important artistic spaces in twentieth-century Britain. Bacon was openly gay in an era when it was illegal and in an art world that was still deeply conservative.
His lovers – George Dyer, who died in a Paris hotel on the eve of Bacon’s most important retrospective; John Edwards, who inherited the estate – were central to his work. English Heritage placed a blue plaque on the mews. In 1998 the studio was carefully dismantled and reassembled, exactly as Bacon left it, at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it can still be visited. He worked in chaos and made masterpieces.