I decided when I was very young that I would have an extraordinary life going everywhere and meeting everyone. But of course I used everybody along the way. 

––Francis Bacon

For Francis Bacon, London was an endless labyrinth of possibilities. He first arrived to live in the city when he was nineteen, having been expelled from his Irish home by his tyrannical father three years prior (he was caught trying on his mother’s underwear); he then spent two years in Paris and Berlin. If the Irish countryside had been a prison in his youth, his coming of age in Weimar Germany had opened his eyes to new possibilities of experience and expression. During his time there he had witnessed the thin line between extravagant luxury and dire need, between the Ritz and the gutter as he described it. He adored the company of those who lived by their instincts, whether they were the super rich, to whom every possibility was available, or the amoral rent boys and petty criminals who he would pick up in East End drinking dens and bring across the tracks for his own amusement.  He would disappear for days on end, and in the vast confines of the metropolis he could delve into every underground bolt-hole and dark alley his inquisitive senses drew him to.

By 1929 he had created some stability in his life. Roy de Maistre was the first in a series of father figures who were both lovers and patrons who supported Bacon and encouraged and guided his talents. The connection continued but the attraction soon waned. In 1931 an extraordinary domestic arrangement had come into being in the Queensbury Mews studio. Living with him now was Jessie Lightfoot, his nanny since birth, an aging Irish spinster devoted to her surrogate son who slept on the kitchen table.  Completing the household was Bacon’s lover of this era, Eric Alden. Still living a hairs breadth from abject poverty, Bacon continued to rely on the rough trade that had kept him warm when he first arrived in London, but he now followed the ironically conventional and lucrative route of advertising himself in The Times as a gentleman’s escort; Nanny Lightfoot would help him pick out suitable offers.