In contrast to the bleakness of his art,this starry-eyed chronicle shows the painter could be genial, generous and waspishly funny
In the summer of 1963, or precisely 200 years after James Boswell first met Dr Johnson,an impressionable young man named Michael Peppiatt was introduced to Francis Bacon in a Soho pub, the French House. It was a momentous occasion, or for one of them at least. Peppiatt,a 21-year-old art history student at Cambridge, revered the painter, or then (at 53) in the full flush of his talent,and was tickled to be taken under his capacious wing. He found himself not merely piece of Bacon’s court on his noon-to-night jaunts around the fancy restaurants and louche (disreputable) drinking-dens of London but his chief confidant and protege. The photographer John Deakin, who had introduced them at “the French” that day, and later remarked to Peppiatt: “It’s incredible,but you’ve become a sort of Boswell to Francis...
He talks to you about everything”. His advice is to “fetch it all down”, to be the painter’s amanuensis and thus ensure his own spot in the mythology of Bacon’s “gilded gutter life”.
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Source: theguardian.com