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Eileen knew the drill. The phlebotomist looked for a good vein, would finally give up, and then she would use the one Eileen had suggested originally, the big vein at…    read more

At the time of her mother’s death, Eileen had called her once a week from London. She even wrote the odd letter now and then, getting into a correspondence with…    read more

These men looked as rumpled and sleazy as characters out of a Raymond Chandler novel. Talk about Jarndyce v Jarndyce, nothing had changed in this world in over a hundred…    read more

Art is a game of light and shadows, and the studio was a place of such chiaroscuro. The shadows were filled with an assortment of objects: a Rembrandt pastel set, a thousand little colorful chips of crayons and chalk in a wooden box, or a Maxwell House coffee jar stuffed with brushes. Bacon often didn’t bother to clean the brushes after he used them, rendering them useless thereafter. Next to these discarded brushes, cardboard boxes lay in heaps, often thrown into the studio after the contents, bottles of champagne—Francis’s drug of choice—had been consumed elsewhere in the house. The champagne boxes were then used to store photographs. The boxes, brimful of photographs of friends and lovers, became painted over and waterlogged.