Francis Bacon in his studio at 7 Reece Mews, London. By Lauren Byrne, Contributor
“I live, you might say, in gilded squalor,” Dublin-born painter Francis Bacon once remarked, explaining his attachment to 7 Reece Mews, the spartan twelve-by-eight-foot London flat that was both his home and studio for the last 30 years of his life.
For Bacon, the drab, confining space, accessed by a ship’s
ladder, was more than just a place to hang his hat. With its paint-spattered
walls, broken furniture and tables laden with rusting buckets of brushes adrift
among a sea of trampled photographs and books, it was as much a work of an as
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