The painters from the so-called School of London have been getting a lot of expert biographical attention in recent years. William Feaver’s hefty two-volume life of Lucian Freud was completed not long ago and now we have 800+ pages from Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan devoted to Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon: Revelations fills an important gap, sitting as it does between the gossipy, somewhat lurid accounts of Bacon’s life written in the past by friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on, and the more academic accounts of his work by art historians.

No biography, even one this painstaking and thorough, can capture completely an artist or a man as complex as Bacon. Inevitably questions remain, most particularly for me around the circumstances, starting in the 1940s, that propelled Bacon, almost entirely self-taught as an artist, from an interior designer of no real accomplishment to one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. No doubt Bacon benefited from the support of powerful patrons and fellow painters like Graham Sutherland, but what remains mysterious and remarkable (at least for me) is how Bacon’s extraordinary and singular artistic vision appeared to grow and flourish in such unpromising soil in the 1930s and 1940s.

Stevens and Swan previously wrote a much-lauded and prize winning biography of De Kooning (which I haven’t read). Francis Bacon: Revelations only enhances their reputations. Achieving the right balance between work and life is always difficult, but is especially so with an artist like Bacon who lived long enough to become something of an art celebrity and whose life and relationships attracted perhaps excessively salacious attention in the years immediately after his death. Stevens and Swan put the focus where it belongs – on those brilliant paintings. Bacon’s life – the troubled and sickly childhood, the masochistic personal relationships, and the wide circle of friends and sycophants – is here in all its color, as it should be, but it never obscures (and often illuminates) the genius behind the works. Having said that, I ended the book feeling that Bacon’s complex and troubled personality had eluded his biographers, just as it had almost everyone who knew him or thought they knew him. That’s not intended to be a criticism of what I think is a superb biography. It’s merely a reflection of how well Bacon hid from others and from himself.