Francis Bacon Studio

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909, to English parents. He lived in both London and Berlin, before a spell in Paris inspired him to become an artist. On returning to London in the 1930s, he worked briefly in furniture design but ultimately found fame as a painter with the critical success of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in 1944. He spent most of the rest of his life in London, producing some of the twentieth century's most celebrated paintings, including a series of works inspired by Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650, Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome).

Dublin City Gallery - The Hugh Lane acquired Bacon's London studio in 1998. Over 7,000 objects from the original artist's studio were found, logged and painstakingly transferred, and the space was formally opened to the public in 2001 - a rare example of a studio being completely transplanted from one city to another. It is accompanied by an online database that forms the first computerised record of the entire contents of an artist's studio. Typical of Bacon's practice, it includes scraps of thick corduroy trousers, cut out arrows and towelling dressing gowns used to texture paintings.