The source photograph for Dog was taken by Francis Bacon’s friend Peter Beard (1938–2020). Beard was known as a provocateur, socialite, photographer, an early pioneer of nature conservation owing to his photographs of East Africa, and an incorrigible drug user. His book The End of the Game, published by Viking in 1965, which contained photographs of dead and endangered wildlife in Kenya, won him immediate international recognition. As a subject, animals interested Francis Bacon because of their proximity to raw, uncultivated sensation. Animals do not dissimulate: they are unaware of themselves; their behaviours are instinctual. Bacon’s friendship with Beard, whom he met in 1967, further enhanced and deepened his interest in animals. Besides Bacon’s paintings of Beard and their conversations, published as ‘The Dead Elephant Interviews’ in 1972, Dog likewise points to their shared interests and personal bond.

Bacon used a contact sheet of photographs by Beard as the source material for this painting. The photograph shows a boxer with a muskrat hanging from its mouth. Beard latterly identified the dog as belonging to his friend and erstwhile travel companion Willie du Pont. Bacon began paintings of animals from photographic sources the previous decade. Study of a Dog (1952, Tate), for instance, used imagery from Eadweard Muybridge’s book Animals in Motion (1899). Bacon made several other large format paintings of dogs in the early fifties, and together they established the dog as a personally distinctive subject in Bacon’s oeuvre. In his monograph of 1971, John Russell evoked a category in Bacon’s work of the fifties. ‘Dogs and monkey are another thing; sphinxes, likewise.’ Of Man with Dog, Russell wrote: ‘it is a marvellously haunting splodge, complete with a suggestion of bone-structure and a hint of gait.’

The material composition and technique of Dog are consistent with Bacon’s established working methods. He discovered the virtues of unprimed canvas by chance in 1947–48 when, ‘having run out of canvas’, he tried painting ‘on the back of an already used canvas’. Thereafter he was ‘content to look no further’ and to use ‘ready-primed canvases stretched back to front from the same artists’ colourman’. The canvas of Dog has the same uniform measurements—14 by 12 inches—as other small-scale paintings that Bacon was making in the late sixties. Painting on unprimed canvas made it possible to create stark contrasts of texture. The background of Dog is painted with a thinly applied imprimatur of green oil colour, which has sunken into the canvas and the fine-grained weave is plainly visible. The image of the dog is painted with black and dark blue colour, laid down in thin, shadow-like areas, and loaded brushstrokes of thick, dry impasto in brighter colours of pink, white and purple. The latter colours were mixed on the palette and applied with a loaded brush in singular applications. Each paint mark is palpable and distinct, and yet they are inseparable from the image they conjure. The daringly simplified schematisation of the source image was an act of improvisation; the scheme was invented not with the aid of forethought and preparation, but rather in the white heat of impulsive experiment. The result was a characteristic example of the artist’s personally distinctive mode of painterly execution.

In the catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon’s paintings, Martin Harrison remarked that Dog is ‘embryonic and experimental’. Although it was not sold or exhibited during the artist’s lifetime, it is a nascent work of art which survives intact and in the form that Bacon made it. It is a topic of speculation about why Bacon retained it in his studio for nearly a decade, between the late sixties and 1978, instead of destroying it. Perhaps it was simply forgotten about. Although he chose not to release it, Dog is a valuable and informative artwork in the context of Bacon’s oeuvre, and it provides a comparatively rare insight into an intermediate stage of his working practice. He tended to regard his studio as a private space: he chose to work from photographs, partly to avoid the inquisitive gaze of models, and he preferred for his work not to be seen whilst in progress. As such, having survived the artist’s censorious hands in unique circumstances, Dog is the rare case of an oil sketch by Bacon, which retains the freshness of its execution and the immediacy of the image.

Dog was removed from Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews in 1978 along with several other works, and these came to be in the possession of an electrician called Mac Robertson. Besides Dog, Robertson owned five intact canvases by Bacon. Dog first came to public attention when Robertson’s collection was sold in a regional English auction house in 2007. The painting was authenticated by the Francis Bacon Authentication Committee on 15 April 2009 and it was included in the subsequent catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s paintings published in 2016.

The appendix included below is an essay about Dog written by Bacon’s friend the writer Michael Peppiatt.


Appendix
Francis Bacon: The Animal Within by Michael Peppiatt

Francis Bacon’s world is hermetic, enmeshed in a complex code of references that range from Greek tragedy and Egyptian sculpture through Picasso and photography to events in his own lifetime. It can also be unexpectedly accessible, as the following essay on and around Dog (c. 1967), sets out to show. This small, eloquently executed painting provides an immediate entry into numerous levels and aspects of Bacon’s art since it resumes so much about his ability to suggest rather than state—or, in the artist’s own words, paraphrased from Valéry, ‘to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance’.

A hallmark stamped on all Bacon’s painting lies in the application of the paint itself, the gesture by which he makes the pigment come unusually alive and speak directly to nerve and eye. This mysterious process—part instinct, part experimentation, part well-practised technique—differs radically from one painter to another, but eventually it becomes as recognizable as a tone of voice or the way someone walks. Van Gogh (whom Bacon admired hugely) had it in abundance, to the extent that he appears to lift the skin off paint and reveal its inner grain. Bacon evolved a similar eloquence, manipulating a highly characteristic palette of sumptuous colour to convey within the medium what paint could say that words or music could not, playing on its inner harmonies and discords to create his own unmistakeable, painterly language. This practice became so ingrained in the artist that even the trial paint marks he made on the wall or the chance combinations as he mixed his colours could not be attributed to anyone else. (I am thinking specifically here of a large frying pan that Bacon used to mix colour in his Paris studio as well as his painting table which was eventually transformed into a huge Bacon—and the only abstract composition he ever made.)

Accordingly, the swirls of poignant pink, grey and cream that flesh out the speeding dog in this picture could have been created only by Bacon. The form appears to have been spun out of a handful of loaded paint strokes instantly, even though it is probable that the intensely self-critical artist came back over it to complete or alter a few details (Bacon usually insisted on being alone in the studio when he worked, so that there are no accounts of the ways in which he worked outside his own). It is also difficult to establish why he chose to depict the humble dog in its headlong course at this particular moment in his career beyond the fact that he always had photographs to hand. It might also point to memories of his childhood in Ireland, where greyhound racing or ‘coursing’ has long been a popular sport….

*

In his own, carefully forged myth and in the minds of almost all his commentators, Bacon has always been seen as metropolitan man par excellence, indissociable from the hub of modern cities. As an adolescent cast adrift in London, he rapidly gravitated to the two other, major European capitals, savouring the harsh modernity and decadence of Berlin before moving on to the intellectual effervescence of Paris in the twenties. Over the following decades, Bacon made a swathe of London his own, a clearly demarcated ‘Baconland’ that stretched from Wheeler’s fish restaurant in Old Compton Street to the Colony Room Club a few minutes’ walk away on Dean Street. It was here, even more than in the Grand Palais or the Metropolitan Museum, that Bacon became Bacon. Made up essentially of rowdy bars and seedy but discreet members’ clubs, this city within a city allowed the real Bacon to emerge until he ruled unopposed, holding court evening after evening and weaving his myth as dandy and drifter, existential hero and outraged atheist among an ever-growing congregation of urban wits and lost souls.

The artist actively encouraged this perception of himself as only at ease in sophisticated cityscapes, from the Ritz to the Grand Véfour or the salons privés of Monte Carlo’s casino. Likewise, his paintings focus mainly on anonymous interiors where figures buckle and deliquesce under the loneliness and despair of big city existence. With few exceptions, any reference to the outside world is rigorously excluded, and the blinds have been drawn over the odd window that might otherwise promise escape. In the Baconian universe, all human life seems to have been concentrated into these sealed, airless spaces, and the rare animal that occurs sits there like a statuette or spread out like a bear rug on the floor.

But this is far from the whole story, and even attentive students of Bacon’s art might be hard put to explain how his origins as a sickly, solitary child in rural Ireland fit into the overall pattern of his life and the way his vision evolved. Once again, the artist assiduously shaped his own legend here, passing lightly over his childhood and arriving promptly at the dramatic point when his father expelled him from the family home for having put on his mother’s underclothes and fancied himself thus transformed in the mirror—a story he told between fits of uncontrollable laughter. Anything to do with the countryside, which he thought of as anywhere with ‘all those things singing outside the window’, was dismissed summarily. Moreover, animals were to be avoided wherever possible, above all horses and dogs which, he made clear, brought on the chronic asthma from which he suffered throughout his life.

Nevertheless, Bacon was born and bred a country boy, albeit a relatively privileged one, on a horse-training farm in the Irish countryside. All his earliest sensations would have been tightly bound up with the muddy paddock, the neighing horses and dogs barking day and night. Beyond that were flat open plains devoted to wildlife, horse-breeding and the traditional country sports enjoyed by the local gentry, notably horse racing and hunting. It would be difficult to imagine a more rustic background, and as a little boy Francis would have observed all life through the prism of nature and its beasts. That summation of human existence by Bacon’s favourite poet, T. S. Eliot—‘Birth, and copulation, and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks’—was borne in on him not so much in the family circle, and even less in the city, but in the stables, mixed with the pungent odour of horse manure and the coarse exclamations of his father’s grooms (with whom, by his own account, Francis had his first sexual encounters).

Animals, red in tooth and claw, remained at the very origin of Bacon’s imagination and grew with him as he grew. His fascination with birds was rooted in the sanctuaries around the Curragh racing track in County Kildare, rich in such species as the teal and increasingly rare golden plover. As his ambitions as a painter developed, Bacon analysed and studied bird movements in the fabulous photographic records of Marey and Muybridge, incorporating their hoverings and swoopings into numerous compositions.

This interest in animal life took the young artist not only to zoos (one well-known picture shows a man feeding a monkey) but also, in early middle age, to the veldt in South Africa, where both his mother and his two sisters had emigrated.

During his stay with his elder sister, Ianthe, on her large citrus farm near Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Bacon made numerous forays, camera in hand, into the bush. His imagination was powerfully stimulated by the dried-out riverbeds and the dense screens of vegetation, especially when they parted to reveal a wild beast. ‘I felt and memorized,’ Bacon later said, ‘the excitement of seeing animals move through the long grass.’ After these trips into the field and visits to Kruger National Park, Bacon grew so enthusiastic about the country that he even considered settling there himself, a surprising admission for someone who, before and after these exotic forays, would rarely stray from the epicentre of the major metropolises.

Meanwhile, the artist fed his new passion with an array of books on wild animals. To Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion he added Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game in Equatorial Africa, Eric Hosking’s Birds of the Night, and Radclyffe Dugmore’s Camera Adventures in the African Wilds. His studio floor became awash with crumpled, paint-spattered photos of snarling monkeys, stealthy leopards and hovering birds of prey. And throughout the fifties, Bacon frequently returned to wild animals of various kinds, above all monkeys, and even unexpectedly sensitive studies of landscapes, as if his focus on man had briefly shifted to his more straightforwardly uninhibited forebears and their environment.

What Bacon sought was precisely the animal, the underlying animal instinct, in man. Having been brought up with dogs and horses all around him, the artist knew from an early age that the most accurate way of tracing and recording the main human passions lay in watching beasts at war and at play, mating and fighting, killing or running for their lives. In time, having observed animals close up in the field and in photographs, Bacon brought this new awareness directly to his studies of man, catching them as if by surprise, alone or coupled, naked and vulnerable in their lairs, but depictions of animals from primates to owls continued in counterpoint in the artist’s work throughout the fifties and sixties.

*

Dogs, no doubt the most urban and familiar of all animals, become the focus of several of Bacon’s paintings dating from this period. Overall, they have neither the prophetic aura of his birds nor the exoticism of his jungle beasts but, as they negotiate their surroundings, sniffing the drains or shadowing their master, they appear altogether more at ease in the universe than Bacon’s humans (a line from Rilke, a poet whom Bacon read, comes to mind: ‘and even the knowing animals are aware that we feel/little secure and at home in our interpreted world’). Perhaps because of their long domestication the dogs appear to embody the natural link to the animal world that humankind has lost, reminding us regularly and subtly of our enduring kinship.

Dogs clearly had a particular hold over Bacon’s imagination, arising directly from his childhood experiences and memories. They appear very early on in his compositions, notably in Figures in a Garden of 1935, painted nearly ten years before he came to be considered as an artist to be reckoned with when he exhibited his controversial, breakthrough triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). Through the fifties, dogs recurred regularly, becoming a familiar feature in the artist’s enigmatic iconography: the two versions of Dog (1952) were followed by Man with Dog (1953), A Performing Dog (1954) and Study of a Dog (c. 1954).

Like so many themes in Bacon’s work, they form a series, not on the level of his Crucifixions, Popes or portraits of Van Gogh, certainly, but close to the variations, say, on Man in Blue. They make subsequent appearances, as in Dog of c. 1967, and in almost valedictory form in Two Studies of George Dyer with Dog (1968), in which the ambiguous dog form becomes a kind of shadow or alter ego cast by Bacon’s ill-fated model and lover of the time.

Did Bacon come at some point to identify with dogs, as Giacometti certainly did when he cast his own canine image in bronze around the same period? If so, it is worth making a comparison because the Swiss sculptor’s animal is clearly downtrodden (as would have been even more apparent in the original plaster version), slinking along the street, whereas Bacon’s are more substantial and alert, emerging from the shadows and dipping their muzzles into the gutter – an image that becomes all the more provocative when one thinks that the painter described his own existence as a ‘gilded gutter life’. At the same time, Bacon’s dogs often appear disorientated, having perhaps forfeited their instincts to domestication and being doomed now to stray through the man-made city in search of their lost identity. Or, conversely, don’t dogs reflect—ape, one might almost say—our own etiolated, animal nature, heeding our command and trotting obediently at our side?

Animals of every stripe continued to teem through Bacon’s imagination. His interest in the behaviour of monkeys carried over into studies of Heads in which man and beast are wholly indistinguishable. It gave rise to a majestic elephant calmly fording a river at dusk and tracked down a lumbering rhinoceros struck still against a barren landscape. Above all, it developed into a major series of bulls and bullfights where the power and the majesty of the beast itself dispensed with the presence of any matador or other human form. From the beginning, it might also be noted, the artist’s fascination with the protohuman led to a whole race of imaginary creatures that he conceived of as the agents of fate, the ‘Furies’, or wreakers of vengeance in Greek mythology, which, Bacon claimed, ‘frequently visited’ him. These strange hybrids snarling their rage and lust for retribution take centre stage first in Bacon’s breakthrough triptych mentioned above, then continue as reminders of human destiny throughout the development of his oeuvre.

In the late sixties, a solitary dog breaks away from the growing pack of Bacon’s extraordinary, imaginary beasts and hurtles towards the conquest of its own freedom like a bird released from its cage. Drawing on Muybridge’s photographic ‘investigations’ of the mastiff known as ‘Dread’, the painter took the experiment a stage further by wrapping the animal’s whole motion into one concerted ball of energy projected forward like a bullet from a barrel. In a flash of pink and grey with white highlights, the animal bursts first out of imaginary barriers to reach maximum speed in seconds. As it races over the grassland after its unidentified prey, Dog (c.1967) suggests pure motion. In a blur of skinny limbs, the animal hurtles forward, heeding nothing but its basic drive. Yet the headlong rush also indicates that it might have just picked up another scent, causing it to turn in a sudden shuddering of speed and skeleton. Seized at that split second, Dog can be seen as compact a symbol of instinct as any of the striking images that Bacon created of animals become wholly animal again.