Collector Walls: The Francis Bacon That Hung in Lucian Freud’s Bedroom

I n 1953, in the garage of a cottage in Henley-on-Thames, England, Francis Bacon set to work on what would become one of his most confrontational paintings to date. The cottage belonged to his then-lover, Peter Lacy, a former fighter pilot, whose volatile presence fed the artist’s extremes of passion and violence. At the time, Bacon was immersed in the studies of Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian pioneer of motion photography, and was particularly drawn to his sequential images of wrestlers. From these chronophotographs, Bacon conjured up something altogether more haunting: a ghostly vision of two men entangled on a bed, their bodies blurred into a single mass of flesh. “Two Figures,” with its unflinching depiction of male desire, would prove controversial from the second it left the garage. Bacon once recalled how his dealer, Erica Brausen, reacted in horror, exclaiming: “Darling, don’t bring that shit in here!” When he tried to explain that it was based on Muybridge’s photographs, she cut him off: “I don’t care where it comes from. I don’t want the police in here!”

Brausen, deeming the work virtually unsellable, took little action to place it with a collector. However, the painter Lucian Freud, intrigued and seemingly unfazed by the work’s viscerality, bought it for the small sum of just £80, through the art critic and part-time dealer David Sylvester. It was one of nine Bacons that Freud acquired and owned in the 1950s, at a time when the friendship between the two artists began to blossom. Bacon even gave Freud a painting as a wedding present when he married Lady Caroline Blackwood. In William Feaver’s biography “The Lives of Lucian Freud,” Feaver quotes Anne Dunn, one of Freud’s former lovers, as saying, “Lucian had this sort of crush on Francis—non-sexual—and Lucian, who was never very generous in the years I knew him, would run after Francis with great wads of banknotes and give them to Francis to go gambling with.”

Bacon’s vice, other than his dangerous obsession with Lacy, was gambling. Freud came to know Bacon early on for his “raucous roulette sessions,” as Feaver describes them, which Bacon hosted in his studio in South Kensington. Freud developed his own temptations with gambling, playing cards with his friend Tim Willoughby at The Clermont Club. There, Freud would regularly wipe out all his earnings, even reaching a point where he had to strike a deal with the club’s owner allowing him to trade in his paintings—at £400 a piece—so he could continue to play.

In the 1960s, as Freud’s gambling continued and he suffered a sudden slump in sales, he had to resort to other means to address his mounting debt. One tactic he came up with was to pawn off his various belongings. In 1964, Freud pawned Bacon’s “Two Figures” to a man named Keith Lichtenstein for £2,400.

Lichtenstein, a prominent figure in Chelsea nightlife, began as a film producer and later reinvented himself as a restaurateur with The Casserole, a buzzy King’s Road dining spot frequented by The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and the fashionable set in the 1960s.

Lichtenstein’s apartment was directly upstairs. The moody, candlelit interiors, filled with a curious combination of Roman busts and Bacon paintings, were designed by his friend, David Hicks. A patterned rug, reminiscent of the legendary hexagon-patterned one Hicks designed for Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” ran throughout. In Lichtenstein’s dining room, “Two Figures” hung ominously on the wall alongside another Bacon. Hicks’s son, Ashley, recalls his late father’s description of the scene: “Bacon would often turn up to Lichtenstein’s apartment, very drunk, to get cash for whatever works he had in the studio.”

“Two Figures” did not remain with Lichtenstein for long. With money from his father, Freud managed to buy it back. Despite this, soon enough Freud needed to sell it again, placing it now with Lady Jane Willoughby, one of his oldest friends and patrons. He struck an unusual arrangement with Willoughby: while it became her property, she would allow Freud to hang it in his home.

By the 1980s, Freud’s bond with Bacon began to fray. Bacon, whom Freud once called the “the wildest and wisest” man he had ever encountered, became embittered when Freud refused to lend out “Two Figures” for Bacon’s 1985 Tate retrospective. Many assumed that Freud chose to lock the painting away out of sheer jealousy. However, according to the Feaver biography, the artist offered his own practical explanation: “For the first 20 years I had it, it was traveling round the world; it came back from one of the tours hanging out of the frame… I’m really rather worried.”

“Two Figures” did not leave Freud’s home for the rest of his life. The painting hung at the foot of his bed. It was the last thing he saw at night and the first when he woke. For Freud, the painting was not only one of Bacon’s greatest creations, but it had also witnessed many stages of his life. After Freud’s death in 2011, it was returned to Lady Willoughby.