Lovers’ drunken brawl nearly cost Francis Bacon an eye, diaries reveal | Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon feared his sight in one eye and how it would affect his future as a painter after he was seriously injured in a drunken brawl with a lover in 1972, it has emerged.
Part of the evidence comes from the previously unpublished diaries of the late Denis Wirth-Miller, who was Bacon’s friend for 45 years, although their relationship was famously tumultuous.
In April 1972, Bacon vacationed in France with Wirth-Miller and his partner, Richard Chopping. In one diary entry, Wirth-Miller wrote: “F very neurotic, worried about his left eye and a tendency to double vision.” In another passage he added: “Francis strangely quiet and low, worried about his eye.”
The fashion designer Dame Zandra Rhodes, who was a close friend of Chopping and Wirth-Miller, through whom she met Bacon several times, confirmed details of the fight in Bacon’s London home and studio.
Speaking to the Observer, she said she was told the story by a friend who knew Bacon’s doctor: “[My friend] told me that Francis had a drunken fight in his studio with a lover. Francis called the doctor because his eye was out. The doctor said, ‘you need to go to the hospital to have your eye put back in’. Francis apparently refused to go to the hospital because he didn’t want the publicity.
“The doctor went to his studio and, despite the dirty environment, repaired the eye and said ‘you need to come to my surgery the next morning so I can clean your eye properly’. Francis did so, and the doctor lectured him not to drink so much. As Francis was just leaving, the doctor said: ‘You left a package there’. Francis said, ‘No, that’s for you’. It was a painting.”
The incident inspired Bacon to paint the violent expressionist Self-Portrait with Injured Eye, 1972, which is said to reflect the desperation and loneliness he felt at the time.
Designer Jon Lys Turner revealed the contents of the diaries to the Observer. He transcribed it slowly but surely, as it is part of a large archive that Wirth-Miller bequeathed to him after his death in 2010.
Turner completed his master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, where he was tutored by Chopping. Both became his mentors and close friends. He recalls many drunken nights with Bacon, who would drink his friends under the table in Soho’s bars and clubs, painted his masterpieces while hungover and claimed late in life that he had been “drunk from the age of 15”. .
While Bacon is revered today as one of Britain’s leading painters, Wirth-Miller is relatively unknown, although his paintings are in public institutions, including the Royal Collection.
Turner said: “Bacon often opened for these two friends as they drove through Europe, or walked along the Essex coast, or painted together.”
But in 1977, after a public falling out with Bacon, Wirth-Miller destroyed some of his own pictures and virtually stopped painting. The friendship continued on and off until Bacon’s death in 1992, but it was never close again.
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