The famed studio of the artist at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, a veritable “junkyard” of worn brushes, half-finished or knife-torn masterpieces, paint-drenched socks, and photographs of nude men, has been relocated to Dublin, the city of his birth to British parents on October 28, 1909. This chaotic studio has been painstakingly moved, dust from the dirt floor and all, to the Hugh Lane Gallery in the Irish capital.

Bacon was not a man who looked back on the past with nostalgia. He likely wouldn’t have been thrilled that the eccentric remnants of his later years and the devilish disorder of his studio have been preserved as an autobiographical exhibit in a museum. Dublin, after all, was his fiercest battleground, where he first faced his demons, and possibly the origin of the “inhuman” tension that he later expressed in his paintings: fluid figures, dismembered bodies, grotesque faces, and eerie, ambiguous beings that seem to scream in either pleasure or from the memory of a profound, ancient pain.

Francis was the second child in a family of three boys and a girl, born to British Army Major Anthony Mortimer Bacon and his wife, Christina Winifred, who was twenty years his junior. His father, a descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, was not known for his noble character. In Ireland, he made a name for himself as a racehorse trainer. He was authoritarian, short-tempered, and puritanical, disciplining his children with a horse whip. He struggled to tolerate the presence and behavior of a child like Francis, who was not only spoiled and asthmatic, but also artistically inclined. The strained father-son relationship reached a climax when Anthony discovered young Francis naked, practicing with his mother’s underwear in front of a bedroom mirror. “My parents always thought I was worthless…,” the painter confessed to art critic and friend David Sylvester in 1981. “My father fought with everyone. He had no friends… I disliked him, but I was sexually attracted to him as a child. I realized this strange attraction was sexual from the start. Later, when I began to have relations with the grooms and stable hands, it became crystal clear.”

The painter sometimes spoke candidly about the violent memories from his childhood. He would recount them, some remember, in a congenial manner, as if they were blessings in disguise.

Sally Vincent, in a Guardian op-ed from May 2001, remarked on how he described his most traumatic childhood experience: being locked for hours in a dark cupboard by his nanny, who wanted to be alone with her boyfriend, while his parents were away. He would cry until he was out of breath, she would recall.

“Much like a person who confronts their deepest fears, only to find that the terrifying monster is merely a reflection of themselves, Bacon understood the roots of fear from an early age. His adolescent issues with his father seemed… trivial,” notes Vincent.

Feeling rejected and ostracized, a young Francis was quietly expelled from his family home, leading him to roam the tumultuous and hedonistic streets of Berlin and Paris. His initial attraction to the arts was channeled into furniture design, but the idea of becoming a painter only solidified later, when he found himself in front of Picasso’s works at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery. However, the piece that would profoundly shake and influence his own painting was none other than Poussin’s iconic “The Massacre of the Innocents”. Bacon was struck by Poussin’s depiction of a human cry on the face of a woman pleading for mercy over her trampled infant. This human cry would recur in various forms in several of Bacon’s works, such as those featuring the Pope, in the Study of the Nurse, and in the haunting figures he presents in his crucifixion-themed pieces, among others.

“What did the cry signify to you?” photographer Francis Giacomobetti asked him a few months before Bacon’s death in a modest Madrid hospital nineteen years ago, aged 82. ‘We enter and exit life with a cry,’ he replied, ‘and perhaps love is merely a veil between the fear of life and the fear of death. This has been my overriding obsession. The men I painted were all in precarious situations; the cry is a testament to their pain and suffering. Animals shriek when they are scared or in pain, as do children. But men are more restrained, often shy. They don’t cry easily, except in situations of extreme pain. The cry is, perhaps, the most potent and immediate symbol of the human condition.’

The British painter is one of the few artists whose life experiences and every psychological fracture have been transformed into high-quality art. “My work is like a diary,” he once said, and to this day, both experts and amateurs alike continue to search for traces of his infamous binges at Soho’s legendary The Colony Room pub, his penchant for gambling, his hedonistic trips to Tangier, and the raw, innocent violence that his paintings exude. They also look for echoes of his tumultuous love affairs, including his relationship with former RAF pilot Peter Lacey, who committed suicide by drinking in Tangier, his notorious liaison with George Dyer, who also ended his life with pills in Paris, and the painter’s final, unique, sexless cohabitation with the eventual inheritor of his fortune, John Edwards.

Those who knew him well were convinced that, in addition to his romantic entanglements with troubled individuals, he was virtually incapable of loving anyone or anything beyond his painting.

Pilot Peter Lacey accused him of ruining his life. Their final encounter was in Tangier, where Lacey eked out a living playing piano at Dean’s Bar. In a spectacular fit of jealousy, Lacey destroyed every object in their home upon discovering the painter in bed with a young Arab. “He was drinking himself to death at the time,” Bacon recalls. “He drank until he felt his pancreas explode. In 1962, on the day of my major exhibition opening at the Tate, among the congratulatory telegrams was one announcing Peter’s death.”

A decade later, a similar drama unfolded, this time featuring George Dyer. The attractive petty thief from the East End, who met Bacon when he broke into his house, committed suicide in their Paris hotel room. This was just as France was celebrating the painter’s splendid retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais, an event for which the suicidal Dyer served as the muse for many works. (Their lives are vividly portrayed in John Maybury’s relatively recent film, Love is the Devil.) In 1973, Bacon expressed his grief over Dyer’s loss through the completion of the Triptych, also known as the Black Triptych. In it, he depicted Dyer’s final agonizing hours in the Paris hotel. First, the moment he vomits naked over the sink, then as he retches across the disheveled room, and finally as he draws his last breath, slumped over the toilet bowl.

Despite his debauched lifestyle, endless late nights, and insatiable thirst for alcohol, Bacon never painted while intoxicated. He picked up his brush early in the morning, with a clear mind. The only work he completed amidst ceaseless drunkenness and tumultuous hangovers was the Study for Figures of the Crucifixion, in 1944. As he explained, alcohol served as a liberating agent at the time, helping him to depict on canvas three hybrid creatures with broken necks and ferociously gaping mouths.

His fascination with flesh in any form was legendary. He described it with remarkable cynicism: “Flesh is life. When I paint red meat as I would a human body, I do it because it is beautiful. I find the carcasses hanging in butcher shops beautiful. Think about it, they are for sale! It’s unbelievably surreal! All creatures on this planet are made of meat. And when you make love, one piece of meat penetrates another. There’s no difference between human meat and that of a hyena or an elephant.”

Regarding his passion for roulette, art critic David Sylvester once asked him, “Is it true that unrepentant gamblers like you play with the intention of losing?” Bacon looked at him curiously and said: “I play to win. Winning excites me. It’s the same thrill I feel in painting when I’m waiting for the right image to emerge.”

The man who loved winning and feared old age once faltered. In his final interview with Francis Giacometti in 1992, when posed with the question, “how would you prefer to die?” his response was immediate: “quickly.” Even in those days, his zest for life remained undiminished. He confessed to still observing men on the street, often forgetting the passage of time. ‘Frequently, when I venture out in the evening, I flirt as if I were still in my fifties. This illusion, after all, is the artist’s privilege – to perpetually feel youthful. The allure of the freedom associated with youth is irresistible… It’s only when I paint that I feel ageless, forever young.”