On view in the Francis Bacon Studio display cases.
Pavements, gutters, streets and motor cards occur frequently in Bacon’s work and are depicted with convincing realism. Francis Bacon’s interest in photographs of street life is revealed by the large number of loose leaves and photography books on street life, particularly of London and Paris, that were found among the items in his Studio. These publications featured the work of well known photographers such as Eugene Atget, a street photographer hugely admired by the Surrealists, as well as general photographic surveys of city life showing ordinary people or children playing in the street. The anonymous, unposed photographic spontaneity of a city street in motion captured in books such as London: City of Any Dream, The Streets of East London and Dans les Rues de Paris had enormous potential to trigger compositional and figurative ideas for the artist.
