Fact File
Name: Francis Bacon
Born: Dublin, 1909
Died: Madrid, 1992
Occupation: Artist
Famous for: His paintings and bohemian lifestyle
Why in the news: His studio is to be dismantled and set up for display in Dublin
If Picasso had been born in Dublin, would we have erected a plaque to mark his place of birth?
It is a question that seemed poignant after reports that Francis Bacon's messy London studio is to be dismantled and reconstructed in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art - right down to every last spent tube of cadmium red.
The answer of course is yes. Similarly, in most other countries in the world, 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin 2 (then a private nursing home), where Bacon was born, would be adorned with a discreet piece of brass. Engraved on it would be Francis Bacon, artist, born in this house, October 1909. As it is, the house is now occupied by O'Rourke, Reid and Co solicitors. Not surprisingly, a receptionist in the office this week said she had no idea that such a luminary breathed his first somewhere in the building.
Such sniping is not to suggest that Bacon, hailed as one of the most intelligent men to ever hold a brush, ranks quite up there with Picasso. He is generally regarded as one of the most significant painters of the 20th century but one critic thought he ranked more alongside Stanley Spencer than the revered Spanish painter.
The combination of flamboyant genius and what some politely describe as an emancipated lifestyle, however, meant he was afforded mythical status long before he died.
He lived in Ireland for 16 years. His father was a horse trainer, with whom Francis had a somewhat strained relationship. He seldom if ever visited the country after he left but it did hold some endearing memories. In a rare interview which took place in his small house in London's West End he told Irish Times critic Brian Fallon he could still remember the tramp of hooves and the ring of trumpets as the British cavalry trained at the Curragh Camp.
The strain grew too much to bear. At the age of 16 his father ejected Francis from the house in Laois. He had been caught trying on his mother's underwear. The tapestry of myths surrounding Francis Bacon was already being designed.
From Ireland he went to Berlin and then to Paris. While on the continent he began to appreciate art and in Paris saw an exhibition of Picasso whom he later accepted was an early and solitary influence. When Bacon himself began to paint seriously, though, his single-minded originality was never in question.
He started off designing furniture when he returned to London to supplement a £3 allowance sent weekly by his mother. Between the first World War - as an asthmatic he was exempted from military service - and the second World War he began to develop as much as a bohemian as a painter.
Fame found him before his artistic genius had blossomed. He was a central figure in the Soho set. The Colony Club, which was frequented by an elite arty crowd including poets George Barker and Sydney (W. S.) Graham, was his stomping ground. He held an enviable position within Muriel Belcher's club. "She was a unique woman," he told Brian Fallon. "She thought I knew a lot of monied people, so she said she would pay me £10 week to bring them in and all drinks paid."
By the late 1940s, the Screaming Popes series had singled him out as an artistic force to be reckoned with. He was self-taught, he claimed, and left much to chance in his work. According to critic Michel Leiris, his paintings "help us, most powerfully, to feel the sheer fact of existence as it is sensed by a man without illusions".
To others they were profoundly disturbing, his stark triptychs coming decades before the bisected formaldehyde creations of Brit Art's Damien Hirst. Gaynor Duffy, an artist with a site dedicated to Bacon on the Internet, said his preoccupation with headless torsos and hanging flesh "suggests he studied Grays Anatomy whilst high on something".
He was feted in the art capitals of the world and contracted to Marlborough Fine Arts. The prices for his work soared and by the 1960s he was part of the existentialist movement - a roving intellectual with a fondness for the writings of Yeats and Beckett.
The media coverage of him was extensive and world-wide but in the main unsolicited.
A typical day for Bacon would start with furious painting. He did not draw but painted directly on to the canvas, sometimes merely raising his brush and splashing at it for inspiration. Lunch would be in Soho seafood restaurant Wheelers, where he would stand everyone champagne. His generosity and antipathy towards the immense fortune he was amassing were legendary. Later he and his friends would retire to the Colony Club for more champagne.
A spot of gambling usually followed. One Irish Times letter writer suggested that he had picked up his gambling habits in a Baggot Street bookies and added that despite his British parentage his preoccupation with sex and religion were uniquely Irish.
Bacon's homosexuality certainly piqued the public's interest although he was not known to flaunt his sexual orientation often. Once though he did turn up at an exhibition with a string of the type of tough-looking men he preferred trailing behind. There are stories that he often paid for this predilection with severe beatings.
He also had his share of perfectly stable relationships, although his boyfriend, George Dyer, killed himself the night before Bacon's retrospective in Paris in 1972.
In the late 1970s he met John Edwards, now his sole heir. It is he who has donated the studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery. He said the Tate turned it down. The Tate says it was never offered the studio. Bacon died and was cremated in 1992. His life story has been made into a film, to be released before the end of the year, in which Derek Jakobi takes the title role.
And now a slice of Bacon is coming home to a country he never really cared for, to a city that does not deem him significant enough to mark his place of birth.
In the art world it is seen as a major coup but one can't help speculating that if ashes could spin, that's what Francis Bacon's would be doing.