Francis Bacon feared for his sight in one eye and how it would affect his future as a painter after he was seriously injured in a drunken brawl with a lover in 1972, it has emerged.
Part of the evidence comes from the previously unpublished diaries of the late Denis Wirth-Miller, who was Bacon’s friend for 45 years, although their relationship was famously turbulent.
In April 1972, Bacon was holidaying in France with Wirth-Miller and his partner, Richard Chopping. In one diary entry, Wirth-Miller wrote: “F very neurotic, concerned over his left eye and a tendency to double vision.” In another passage, he added: “Francis strangely quiet and low, worried about his eye.”
The fashion designer Dame Zandra Rhodes, who was a close friend of Chopping and Wirth-Miller, through whom she met Bacon several times, confirmed details of the brawl in Bacon’s London home and studio.
Speaking to the Observer, she said she had been told the story by a friend who knew Bacon’s doctor: “[My friend] told me that Francis had had a drunken fight in his studio with a lover. Francis phoned the doctor because his eye was out. The doctor said, ‘you must go to hospital to have your eye put back’. Francis refused point-blank to go to the hospital because he didn’t want the publicity.
“The doctor went to his studio and, despite the filthy environment, sewed the eye back, saying ‘you must come to my surgery the next morning so that I can clean your eye properly’. Francis did that, and the doctor gave him a lecture that he shouldn’t drink so much. When Francis was just leaving, the doctor said, ‘you’ve left a package there’. Francis said, ‘No, that’s for you’. It was a painting.”
The incident inspired Bacon to paint the violent expressionist Self-Portrait with Injured Eye, 1972, which is said to reflect the desperation and loneliness he felt at the time.
Designer Jon Lys Turner revealed the contents of the diaries to the Observer. He has been transcribing them, slowly but surely, as they are part of a vast archive that Wirth-Miller bequeathed to him following his death in 2010.
Turner completed his masters degree at the Royal College of Art, where he was taught by Chopping. Both became his mentors and close friends. He recalls many drunken evenings with Bacon, who would drink his friends under the table in Soho’s pubs and clubs, painted his masterpieces while hungover and, late in life, claimed to have been “drunk since the age of 15”.
While Bacon is revered today as one of Britain’s foremost painters, Wirth-Miller is relatively unknown, although his paintings are in public institutions, including the Royal Collection.
Turner said: “Bacon would often open up to these two friends as they drove across Europe, or walked along the Essex coast, or painted together.”
But, in 1977, after a public spat with Bacon, Wirth-Miller destroyed some of his own pictures and virtually gave up painting. The friendship continued on and off until Bacon’s death in 1992, but it was never as close again.