“The moment I saw this place I knew that I could work here.”

Francis Bacon, on first seeing 7 Reece Mews, October 1961

“He loved it in that little room and said

he could work better in there than in any

studio he’d ever had. Even though he was

offered grand studio spaces many times,

he never considered moving.”

John Edwards, Foreword, 7 Reece Mews Francis Bacon’s Studio, Thames & Hudson, London, 2001

Francis Bacon is, on the Tate’s own formulation, ‘one of the most important painters of the twentieth century’: a figure who stands in oil where Picasso stands in cubism and Pollock in gesture, and whose record at auction, set twenty-one years after his death, made him for a time the most expensive artist in history. The present door is the front door of the small mews in which Bacon lived and worked for the last thirty-one years of his life.

It is, as objects go, an oddity. Tall and unusually narrow, considerably taller than a domestic front door, panelled in old wood and painted a chalky pale grey green that has darkened over the decades into the colour of a London pavement after rain. The brass is all original: the small numeral ‘7’ fixed near the top, the octagonal knob set low and worn smooth by use, the rectangular letterplate beneath. The patina is the patina of a working door, not weathered so much as handled, the surface dulled by thirty-one years of fingertips, palms, sleeves, the brush of coats in passing. Its proportions are a vestige of what these buildings used to be: Victorian coach houses, built tall on the ground floor to admit a carriage and a horse, with cramped servant quarters above. From October 1961 until the morning of his last journey to Madrid in April 1992, this was the door Francis Bacon came home to.

Behind it, up a staircase so steep that a length of marine rope was strung along the wall to haul oneself up, lay the small upper room, four metres by six, lit by a single west facing skylight, in which the late screaming popes, the crucifixions, the great triptychs after the deaths of Peter Lacy and George Dyer, the portraits of Lucian Freud and Henrietta Moraes, and the unbroken sequence of self-portraits begun in 1971 were all painted. The door was the membrane between two Bacons. On its outer side, the dandified figure in the leather jacket, hair lacquered with boot polish, on his way to the Colony Room, the French House, Wheeler’s and the gambling clubs of Soho. On its inner side, the painter who rose at dawn, hungover or not, to face whatever raw, unprimed canvas was waiting under the skylight.

Few twentieth-century thresholds saw such notable traffic. Erica Brausen of the Hanover Gallery was an early visitor; the dealers from Marlborough Fine Art, Bacon’s sole representatives from 1958 to the end of his life, came in person to collect the canvases that would travel to Bond Street, Paris and New York. The critic David Sylvester, who would name Bacon ‘the religious painter of an atheistic age’, crossed it repeatedly between 1962 and 1986 to record the conversations that became the canonical text on Bacon’s work and one of the great interview cycles of post war English letters. Lucian Freud came as friend and rival, until they fell out in the mid-1970s. Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews and Daniel Farson came too. So did Melvyn Bragg, with a film crew, for the 1985 South Bank Show that won that year’s International Emmy and remains the canonical filmed portrait of the artist; Bragg later described the upstairs flatlet beyond the door as ‘idiosyncratic, almost insanely eccentric’.

And the photographers. Few twentieth-century studios were more thoroughly photographed than this one. The Vogue photographer John Deakin came with his Rolleiflex, leaving behind contact sheets, Henrietta Moraes nude on a bed, Isabel Rawsthorne in profile, George Dyer in a flat cap, that Bacon then crumpled, tore, paint stained and worked from on the floor. Bill Brandt photographed Bacon for The Sunday Times Magazine in 1963. Henri Cartier Bresson, on a London visit in 1971, captured one of his great photo portraits: Bacon in a leather jacket, the line of the mouth held against the lens. Jorge Lewinski photographed him at Reece Mews in 1970, Ian Berry in 1967, Jacques Saraben in 1972, Mayotte Magnus and Jesse Fernandez in 1977. And Perry Ogden, given access by John Edwards in 1998 after Bacon’s death, photographed every surface of the studio across days of working in it undisturbed, the resulting book a forensic record of the room behind the door and the principal visual document of the place.

Other visitors came less for art than for Bacon himself. Muriel Belcher of the Colony Club was a confidante; the columnist Jeffrey Bernard a drinking companion; the actor Tom Baker an occasional caller. Sitters came rarely, since Bacon preferred to paint from photographs, but the four people he did paint from life, Freud among them, climbed the rope-railed stair. Buyers came: collectors from Switzerland, Texas and Japan, discreetly escorted by Marlborough staff. Burglars came as well: it was through this door, on at least one disputed account, that the East End petty criminal George Dyer was first admitted in late 1963, having dropped through the skylight in a clumsy break in and been confronted by Bacon with the famous ultimatum that began their love affair. Freud, asked years later, gave a less picaresque version: the two had simply met in a club and come back to Reece Mews. Either way, the door admitted Dyer, and the eight years of paintings made from his face, and the great Black Triptychs made after his suicide on the eve of Bacon’s 1971 Grand Palais retrospective, followed.

John Edwards also frequented, having met Bacon at the Colony Club in 1974, and becoming companions from then onwards. He became the subject of more than twenty paintings, including major late works such as Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards (1984, private collection). Edwards recalled of his studio, ‘he loved it in that little room and said he could work better in there than in any studio he’d ever had. Even though he was offered grand studio spaces many times, he never considered moving. South Kensington was his favourite part of London, and he loathed the countryside.’ (Edwards, Foreword in 7 Reece Mews Francis Bacon’s Studio, Thames & Hudson, London, 2001). Bacon described Edwards as his ‘true friend’ and made him his sole heir.

Living next door to Bacon, all the while, was John Spero. Spero was, and remains, one of London’s most respected dealers in classic motor cars, with the showroom that the cognoscenti knew tucked discreetly into the mews behind the Old Brompton Road, and his own quarters above it. The two men were neighbours in the literal, party wall sense: a single brick course separating Bacon’s painting room from Spero’s rooms above the showroom floor.

On 28 April 1992 Bacon died of a heart attack in a private clinic in Madrid. He was eighty-two and had been chronically asthmatic all his life. He had not been at Reece Mews for several weeks. The studio was as he had left it on the morning he flew out, the last unfinished self-portrait still on the easel, the paintbrushes upright in their tin, the floor an archaeology of torn photographs and trodden newspaper. The estate, the studio, and everything in it passed by his will to John Edwards.

For six years the door stayed shut. Edwards lived briefly with the studio as he had inherited it, then in 1998, with Sir Brian Clarke as executor, made the decision that secured its afterlife. Through the gallerist James Mayor, Edwards and Clarke met Barbara Dawson, Director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, and an extraordinary plan was agreed: the entire studio, walls, doors, ceiling, floor, and every object in it, would be lifted, transported and rebuilt in the city of Bacon’s birth. A team of art historians, conservators and archaeologists numbered every item, drew up survey plans of every shelf and surface, and across the following months dismantled the room piece by piece. ‘A little corner of South Kensington moved to Ireland, his birthplace,’ Edwards observed. ‘I think it would have made him roar with laughter.’ (Ibid.). It was during this dismantling, with the front door about to be replaced with a modern equivalent for the property that remained, that John Spero asked John Edwards if he might have the original.

It stands as a singular Bacon object: the only one of its kind outside the Hugh Lane in Dublin, and the only one likely ever to come to market. It is, for the right collector, the conversation piece of a lifetime – an object with a single place in twentieth-century cultural history. The owner acquires not a piece of architectural salvage but a relic in the proper sense: an object made significant by sustained physical contact with one of the most important painters of the twentieth-century, every working day, for thirty-one years.