Francis Bacon was born in Ireland to English parents in 1909. He suffered from ill health and respiratory ailments all his life, sometimes being treated with morphine in childhood. It has been said that he was disciplined by and discovered homosexual sex with the Irish horse groomers in whose care he was sometimes left.

Bacon was a self-taught artist who became a master of the Expressionist Movement. His personal estate was valued at 11 million English Pounds at the time of his death in 1992 in Spain.

One could describe Bacon's work as mirroring a horrific, existentialist vision, inspired by a century in which two world wars and numerous waves of genocide defined humanity in a starkly monstrous way.

Bacon destroyed much of his own art, paricularly his early work, believing it to be inferior.

His iconic masterpiece is the "Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X," a work to rival The Scream by Munch as a grotesque vision of existential horror.