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Provenance: Acquired by the current owner, 1969.

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Literature: The Studio Magazine, August 1930, p. 141 (design illustrated in-situ, see fig. above)
Alister O'Neill, London - After A Fashion, London, 2007, pp. 106-7 (illustrations and discussion of Bacon's furniture designs), p. 110 (Francis Giacobetti, photograph of Francis Bacon reflected in dressing table mirror, 1991)

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Notes: No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.
The present stool is a scarce surviving element of a suite of modernist furniture that Francis Bacon designed and exhibited in 1930, his brief activities as an interior decorator having since been overshadowed by his profile as an artist. Subsequent to travels in Paris and Berlin during the late 1920s, where he had the opportunity to study the progressive Modernist tubular steel furniture then being pioneered by the Bauhaus in Dessau and Charlotte Perriand in Paris, Bacon was one of the first British designers to reinterpret and adopt these new interior tendencies.

In August 1930 The Studio Magazine - Britain's leading forum for progressive architecture and design - published an article entitled 'The 1930 Look in British Decoration', which featured a small group of furnishings, including a dressing table with large circular mirror, and a companion dressing table stool. The furnishings were photographed and exhibited in Bacon's small studio above a converted garage in Queensbury Mews West, South Kensington. Bacon's scheme, which featured bare white walls and white rubber curtains, was highly acclaimed and lead to a commission for Bacon to provide similar curtaining to the then-editor of British Vogue. Despite favourable reviews, it would appear that none of the furnishings were developed beyond the initial examples, and by 1933 Bacon had abandoned decoration altogether in favour of painting.

Despite no longer having an active involvement of the creation of physical interior spaces or furniture, in Bacon's paintings there remains a strongly architectural aspect - the tubular steel of his furniture is now transformed into cages that encase figures, the rubber curtains express themselves as vertical lines, and the circular mirrors now function as devices of containment.

The whereabouts of the furnishings that Bacon designed in 1930, had not, until recently, been widely known. Of all of the pieces, it would seem that the only element Bacon retained until his death was the large circular mirror that originally formed part of the dressing table. The mirror, now pockmarked with age and splashed with brushstrokes, appears in the background of a John Deakin photograph of Bacon's lover George Dyer, and in 1991 Bacon elects to have his portrait taken, by photographer Francis Giacobetti, as a reflection in this same mirror.