Francis Bacon.
Champagne drinking, cigar smoking, highly respected bohemian and artist.
Born in Dublin on October 28th, 1909, the second of five children, he has been described as both Irish and British.
Bacon's painterly but abstracted figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds.
He began painting during his early 20s and worked only sporadically until his mid 30s. Before this time he drifted, earning his living as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs.
His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych 'Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion', which depicts three writhing anthropomorphic creatures set against a flat burnt orange background.
It was this work and his heads and figures of the late 1940s through to the mid 1950s that sealed his reputation as a notably bleak chronicler of the human condition.
Following the 1971 suicide of his lover George Dyer, Bacon's art became more personal, inward looking and preoccupied with the themes and motifs of death.
Bacon met George Dyer in 1964 when, he claimed, he caught the young man breaking into his home. Dyer had grown up in the East End of London in a family steeped in crime.
The climax of Bacon's late period came with his 1982 "Study for Self-Portrait", and his late masterpiece 'Study for a Self Portrait - Triptych', painted between 1985 and 1986.
He is quoted as saying "All artists are vain, they long to be recognised and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free."
Other quotes are "Painting gave meaning to my life which without it it would not have had," and "Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint."
At the age of 82, his chronic asthma had developed into a respiratory condition and he could not talk or breathe very well. He died of cardiac arrest on April 28th 1992, attempts to resuscitate him having failed.