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Three colour photographs of Francis Bacon at a gallery private view party circa 1980. 100x148mm. John Edwards was Bacon s companion from the mid-1970s. From the East End of London, Edwards met Bacon in the Colony Club in 1974 through his older brother David Edwards, who was a friend of Muriel Belcher. Edwards and Bacon became very close friends from then onwards. John Edwards was Bacon s sole heir and in 1998 he donated the entire contents of the Reece Mews Studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. He is the subject of some of Bacon s most significant portraits such as Portrait of John Edwards,1988.Whatever John Edwards s other human qualities and many will testify to his engaging warmth and directness it is as the subject of many of Bacon s important paintings and for his proud commitment and deep sense of responsibility towards Bacon s artistic legacy that he will be remembered beyond his immediate circle of friends.He was born in Hackney, East London, on 10 September 1949, the third of the six children of John and Beatrice Edwards. John Edwards Senior was a dock-worker, but had been both a champion boxer and a World War II hero who rescued two crewmates from the sea after their ship, HMS Bedouin, had been sunk by enemy bombs; a year before his death in 1997 he was awarded the Maltese Cross. Though fond of his children, he could be a strict disciplinarian, against which the sensitive John, and to a lesser extent his three brothers, Leonard, David and Michael and his sisters Pat and Coleen, were inclined to rebel. Severely dyslexic and consequently poorly educated, John Edwards Junior could scarcely read or write, but managed to overcome this by dint of his engaging personality.The story of Edwards s first meeting with Bacon is now well known. As habitués of the Colony Room in Soho both men were friendly with the club s owner, Muriel Belcher, and the barman Ian Board. At that time, Edwards was managing three of his brothers pubs; he had been alerted by Belcher to the fact that Bacon and his friends were planning to visit one of the pubs, the Swan in Straford East, and acting on her advice ordered several crates of champagne. The party, however, had failed to arrive, and when Edwards saw Bacon in the Colony Room he confronted him about the inconvenience he had caused champagne not being a popular drink with his regulars in the strongest possible language. Bacon, by now accustomed to universal deference, was duly intrigued by a figure who was neither remotely awed by him nor wanted anything from him.Gossip that the close friendship between the two men meant they were lovers was perhaps inevitable, but wholly unfounded. Their relationship thrived on Edwards s honesty, and its longevity was due to its lack of complications. Edwards was emphatic that you couldn t ever give in to Francis that would have been the end of it. In fact, each was able to fill a gap in the other s life. When they met, Edwards was twenty-six and Bacon some forty years older; to some extent Edwards became the son Bacon whom he always referred to as Eggs would never otherwise have had, while to him Bacon was the enthralling conversationalist and a concerned and sympathetic paternal figure. For his part, Bacon called Edwards the only true friend I ever had. Together they travelled widely, on holidays and to attend the burgeoning international exhibitions of Bacon s paintings. They frequented restaurants, gambling casinos and drinking clubs together, and Edwards was sometimes required to extricate Bacon from situations in which his sharp tongue threatened to provoke trouble; occasionally Edwards had to resort to violence himself in order to defend the irascible and possibly drunken painter, but most often he intervened when he saw someone was taking advantage of Bacon s habitual generosity.More significantly, Edwards was the subject of more than twenty of Bacon s paintings, including major late works such as Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, Seller Inventory # 027606
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