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Visual Culture in Britain

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Cat's Cradle - Francis Bacon and the Art of 'Isabel Rawsthorne'

Carol Jacobi

Online publication date: 09 December 2009

To cite this Article Jacobi, Carol(2009) 'Cat's Cradle - Francis Bacon and the Art of 'Isabel Rawsthorne'', Visual Culture in
Britain, 10: 3, 293 314
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14714780903265945
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 Carol Jacobi

Cats Cradle Francis Bacon and the Art of Isabel

Rawsthorne

This first critical article on the art of Isabel Rawsthorne (Figure 1) will
introduce her career and offer a glimpse of its implications for Francis
Bacon during and after the war.1 Since Hugh Davies pioneering work on
Bacons work during this period, it has remained at best relatively obscure
and at worst incorporated into reductive myths of autonomy and instinct.
Recent and current research is, however, identifying a proliferation of
sources and associations, suggesting that we can think of these years as an
accelerated engagement with painting, and paint, through painters.2 The
destroyed canvases, forgotten liaisons and legends of self-taught, sponta-
neous transformation arise precisely because the transformations were
neither spontaneous nor unschooled.3 They were an opportunist, magpie
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multiplicity of intersections, a tussle to come to terms with the state of the art
through other artists, to which Rawsthorne was key.
It is a measure of Bacons ingenuity and skill that this phase of investigation
quickly resolved into, and was publicized as, a dialogue with only the very
great, a dialogue, moreover, that was presented not as influence, but as an
exchange between equals. By 1946 he was already being compared to
Vela zquez.4 Such virtuoso self-fashioning was orientated towards the pro-
duction of a singularity which I shall not challenge. Neither do I intend to
diagnose influence between Bacon and Rawsthorne. I wish, rather, to drama-
tize debate, to set Bacons painting more vividly within the risks, experiments
and discoveries that were taking place during and following the war.
Rawsthorne married three times and has therefore been known by four
names during her life. Although she was born Isabel Nicholas, this text will
revert to the professional name under which she worked and exhibited:
Isabel Lambert.

Two figures
Francis Bacon (190992) was three years older than Isabel Lambert
(191292). Where his familys background was military, her father was
a captain in the merchant navy, but both men dealt in animals: Edward
Bacon bred horses and Philip Nicholas traded exotic breeds to British
zoos.5 Neither child enjoyed a great deal of paternal care. The incompat-
ibility, violence and eventual rejection delivered by Eddy Bacon to some
degree matched Nicholas long absences at sea and death during
Lamberts teens. Although she had a happier youth, being loved, healthy
and allowed to run wild, her mothers sudden loss of financial support
and unsympathetic Edwardian values led Lambert to leave home at an
early age.6 Like Bacon, she was living on her own by seventeen, reliant on

Visual Culture in Britain ISSN 1471-4787 print/ISSN 1941-8361 online

# 2009 Taylor & Francis http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/14714780903265945
 294 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

Figure 1. Isabel Lambert with

Two Nudes and Copy of a
Portrait of Pompeian Couple,
197 Albany Street, Regents
Park, 1950, photographer
unknown. # Biddy Noakes.
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wit, charm and opportunism. She was, however, already determined on

painting and studying at Liverpool School of Art. In 1930, she won a
scholarship to the Royal Academy and went to London, but found the
institution dilatory, stifling and less tolerant of her independent lifestyle.
After two years she left for a place in the studio of Jacob Epstein, then at
the height of his reputation as a controversial modern.
Lambert worked, modelled and lived with the Epsteins, sharing a bed-
room and friendship with their teenage daughter, Peggy Jean, as well as a
relationship with Epstein himself.7 This interweaving of pragmatic and real
relations, independence and patriarchal protection, echoes Bacons early
years with patrons such as Roy de Maistre and Eric Hall.8 Although it
could be argued that Lambert gained training and found her way to the
heart of the avant-garde more efficiently than Bacon, both artists exhibited
for the first time in mainstream galleries between 1933 and 1934. Bacon
showed at the Mayor Gallery and Lambert at the Arnold Haskell. Lambert
was required to leave the Epsteins the following year to hide a pregnancy;
the child returned to be brought up by Margaret Epstein, and Lambert
moved to Left Bank Paris. From September 1934, she studied in the
Acade mie de la Grande Chaumie` re, lived with the painter Balthus and his
wife, and modelled and painted in the studio of Andre Derain. At twenty-
four, financial independence of a kind (and her own studio) was secured by
marriage to a dashing Daily Express journalist, Sefton Delmer.9 Lambert
resided in luxury on the Right Bank, but continued her Left Bank life and
fond relationships with earlier protectors. Two liaisons would become
especially important, one with Harpers Bazaar photographer-turned-artist
 Carol Jacobi 295

Peter Rose Pulham, and the other with the Swiss sculptor Alberto
Giacometti. Both men lived bohemian existences and neither was in a
position to offer Lambert security when she returned, single, after the
war.10 She became involved with a series of composers, living briefly with
Rene Leibowitz in 1946, returning to London the following year to marry
Constant Lambert, the English Diagalev, at thirty-five, and, at forty-two,
wedding Alan Rawsthorne. The intimacy with Rose Pulham and with
Giacometti would last, however, constant, discreet and mainly platonic,
until their deaths in 1956 and 1966, respectively.
Bacon and Lambert could have been aware of each other as early as the
1930s, when they exhibited in London. Her unpublished memoir is vague
on the timings and details of relationships, and particularly reticent on
Bacon, saying simply that she met him in Paris with Peter.11 They may
have met during Lamberts first sojourn there before the war, rather than
during her second, as from 1945 Peter Rose Pulham was living in Norfolk,
then in Valmondois, Val-dOise. In 1934, Lambert stayed in the same
Montparnasse hotel as Bacon had in 1928, the Delambre, just behind the
Cafe Dome. If Bacon returned to Paris in the 1930s, their paths may have
crossed there or in arty cafe s and clubs, albeit with Bacon on the fringes of a
society in which Lambert had quickly found a place. If he was there he left
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no trace, however, and no definite knowledge exists about his presence in

Paris during these six years. Valmondois was only forty kilometres from
Paris, so Rose Pulham, Lambert and he may have met up there after the war.
Whether or not Lambert and Bacon were aware of each other before the
war, they certainly knew each other during it. The repeated roll-call of
characters, streets and pubs that pepper the memoirs of the war period
confirms Martin Hammers estimate that the London artistic avant garde
comprised no more than a few hundred persons artists, collectors, gallery
owners, supporters circulating around an equally restricted array of
places.12 Lambert exchanged Paris for London on 14 June 1940, the day
the Germans invaded. She lived an up-market life in Lincolns Inn, but Rose
Pulham moved out of the Cavendish Hotel into Lawrence Street, parallel to
Glebe Place, where Bacon had a studio.13 Lambert was a frequent visitor, of
course (she and another Paris comrade, the civil servant/spy Donald
Maclean, sunbathed on the roof). It is possible the artists met in one of the
local pubs, which were important congregation points during the Blitz. They
were certainly mixing in the Soho clubs by late 1942.14 Between 1942 and
1943, Lambert and Bacon were in London only occasionally; he was with
Hall in Petersfield and she was sequestered at Woburn, adapting her skills to
botanical illustration, printing, forgery and pornography in a secret house
devoted to black propaganda. They returned to London in 1943; she was
working at Bush House when Bacon took on Millais studio in Cromwell
Place. He and Lambert were part of the arty/bohemian/media set that
congregated around the West End and the BBC, as well as Kensington and
Chelsea. This included Lamberts particular friends such as Rose Pulham,
the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi,15 poets Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas
(recorded in an effervescent portrait, c.19479),16 old Parisian comrades such
as Maclean, Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson (backer and editor of Horizon
magazine), and Mechtild Nawiasky (editor of Lilliput).17 Rose Pulham
 296 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

temporarily had a photographic studio in Ebury Street and took pictures in

Bacons studio that year.18
Lambert probably drew and painted more consistently than Bacon in the
period before and during the war but, like his, almost none of her work from
this time survives, possibly destroyed, but more likely lost. Their shared
circumstance is hinted at by the fact that both artists had their next impor-
tant solo shows in the same year and at the same venue, Erica Brausens
newly established Hanover Gallery. Lamberts opened in February 1949 and
Bacons in November. Both painted for follow-on exhibitions, including
London Paris at the ICA in 1950, although only Lambert participated in
the Festival of Britain. Often together, they shared a scintillating social life,
matching each other in magnetism, wit and debate. In August 1950, for
example, Bacon went to Gertrude Steins Wedding Bouquet (spoken by a fully
made-up Constant), followed by a party with Margot Fonteyn, Frederick
Ashton, Elizabeth Lutyens and other luminaries. He left last, at 7 a.m., with
Alan Rawsthorne.19 By 1951, Constant had banned Bacon and Connolly
from their home.20 They socialized with the Horizon circle elsewhere; a
typical Soho dinner at the French Club with Bacon, Paolozzi, Watson, the
philosopher A.J. Ayer and Stephen Spender was paid for by Watsons lover,
Norman Fowler.21 Christmas of 1948 and of 1950 was spent together in the
country, at Bradwell, the home of Labour politician Tom Driberg.22 Lambert
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sums up a weekend there in the summer of 1949, with the politicians

Aneurin Bevan and Jenny Lee, as consisting of fast, pointed, conversations
on many subjects including Arts, Greek theatre.23
The Horizon network was useful to Bacon, but he also won the admiration
and affection of other key figures in the art world such as Herbert Read and
Graham Sutherland, to whom Lambert, with her connections and perspec-
tive from Paris, showed little respect. She preferred the company of less
establishment characters, such as Paolozzi, Rose Pulham and Bacon him-
self. She did not hold back from disagreeing violently with Matthew Smith
when at his studio with Paolozzi and Bacon, and on other occasions argued
with Roland Penrose and Henry Moore.24 Smith and Penrose remained loyal
friends, as did Michael Ayrton (though his art annoyed her too), but Lambert
and Moore never got on: he does tend to say the MOST NAIVE, outra-
geously juvenile statements such as the test of a painting is if you could
turn it into a sculpture . . . Ive been used to better conversation!25
The deciding factor in the advance of Lamberts reputation was, however,
unconnected to her esprit de contraire.26 In 1950 she put off exhibitions in
Paris and Milan and her second solo show at the Hanover, in favour of
designing the Covent Garden ballet Tiresias.27 Although the controversial
scheme won success, she regretted the distraction and declared it would be
her last. Bacon, by contrast, dropped his idea of designing Jean Paul Sartres
Les Mouches around this time.28 By 1951, Bacon and Brausen had established
his work with major collectors and galleries, including MoMA and Tate,
while Lambert had become known as a designer. The untimely death of
Constant in August 1951 and the disappearance of most of their money
induced Lambert to reappear as a decorator, creating the opera Electra and
the ballet Blood Wedding for 1953. She did further ballets, Madame
Chrysanthe`me in 1955 and Jabez and the Devils in 1961.
 Carol Jacobi 297

The loss of Constant left Lambert distraught, but freer to paint. The more
she focused on art, however, the less she cared about the art world. She
returned to Paris again and worked in a tiny garret until she was per-
suaded to exchange some independence for a cottage and studio with Alan
Rawsthorne in the village of Little Sampford in Essex. She continued to see
friends at gatherings in London and Paris, but spent more and more time in
the country, not re-exhibiting at the Hanover until 1959 and letting nearly a
decade elapse before her show at the Marlborough in 1968. Many artists
dislike exhibiting, but Lambert hated it; this word is triple underlined in a
letter to Rose Pulham: it takes months off my work . . . BUGGER.29 When
asked in later life if she had plans to exhibit, she replied simply: Dont you
ever dream that youre walking stark naked through Piccadilly Circus?30
During this period Bacon won his first Tate retrospective, began his inter-
views, and, as Peppiatt has remarked, passed from . . . brilliant outsider to
a successful artist of international stature.31 Lambert gained less fame or
financial independence. Painting was always a process of experiment, and
she became impatient with any approach that she had mastered, embark-
ing on a new project which took many years to bear fruit. Admiring though
she was of Bacon, she was critical of periods of his career when she felt he
was repeating himself.32 The variations between each of her phases wrong-
footed the critics, however, making it difficult for her to establish a name.
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Her last departure, the monumental Migrations series painted in her seven-
ties, remains uncelebrated.

Thinking around
Lamberts relationship with Bacon conforms to a pattern marked by experi-
mentalism and disdain for convention, but most of all by passion for ideas.
Her life and letters suggest that she and Bacon knew each other from 1943,
were particularly intimate between 1948 and 1950, and were close friends
thereafter. He painted her between 1963 and 1983. Her copy of John Russells
1971 book was given to her by Bacon with an affectionate dedication and she
stayed with him at his hotel on the occasion of his retrospective at the Grand
Palais that year. There is more than one account of a physical dimension,
including Bacons claim in an interview with Paris Match in 1985.33 A letter
from Lambert to Rose Pulham written in 1950 makes breathless reference to
news that she is longing to tell, of a weekend at Faringdon with Francis.34
Biddy Noakes, a close friend of Lamberts (and custodian of her estate), has
suggested that sex was in part a way of getting to know someone beyond the
usual barriers.35 Rose Pulham, Giacometti, Georges and Diane Bataille and
Michel Leiris, to select a few examples, shared with Lambert similarly
vividly affectionate and intellectual friendships (Leiris regularly sending
her manuscripts, for instance) long after any sexual relations had ceased.
An understanding of this connection changes our image of Bacon in his
thirties. We find him already privy to a network of artistic and intellectual
activity focused on Paris. Key encounters ascribed to the 1960s through
Sonia Orwell or Anne Fleming had already occurred by the late 1940s. This
probably included meeting Anne Fleming herself, with whose husband-
to-be, the writer Ian, Lambert socialized, as well as Patrick Leigh-Fermor
 298 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

and his future wife, Joan.36 The latter, a photographer, was Lamberts
closest girlfriend and was at that time married to Lamberts lover, John
Rayner (Joan had met Leigh-Fermor during the war and married him in
1963). Leiris, an important critic and friend of Bacons, was known to
Lambert from the 1930s and was close by 1946.37 Bacons social network
the writers and intellectuals who would remain important through his
career maps exactly onto Lamberts wartime circle.
More important still is Lambert herself, one of the last to leave Paris in 1940,
one of the first to return in May 1945, bilingual and in continual dialogue with
the Parisian avant garde. She represented for Bacon not a certain set of ideas
that can be shown to have influenced (or not) his art, but an artist and art in
process. A wartime friendship with her and Rose Pulham, associates of Pablo
Picasso, Giacometti, Balthus and old hands such as Derain,38 as well as British
artists such as Ayrton and Smith (whose studio was in the same building as
Rose Pulhams flat),39 would chime with Bacons quite sudden integration
into mainstream artistic circles and engagement with studio practice after
1943, analysed by Hammer in Bacon and Sutherland. Where Sutherland was
older and relatively established, Lambert and Rose Pulham, passionate,
bohemian, iconoclastic refugees from the Left Bank, must have seemed
exemplars of the coming generation, and the possibility of being a part of
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it.40 Between 1943 and 1949 Bacon began to paint in a more sustained way, to
present himself as a major voice and relaunched himself with his masterpiece
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c.1944), exhibited in 1945.
An examination of intersections between his and Lamberts careers at this
time can cast light on the set of decisions that brought this about.
Bacons Three Studies was famously based on the Eumenides or Furies
of Aeschylus The Oresteia, informed by T.S. Eliots updating of it in The
Family Reunion (1939) and William Bedell Stanfords newly published
Aeschylus and his Style: A Study in Language and Personality (1942).
Lambert, like Bacon, was fascinated by myth, read the classics and sought
opportunities to discuss them with those who had had a classical educa-
tion notably, Rose Pulham and Lamberts wartime lovers, Rayner41 and
MacNeice. The latter had created a new translation of The Agamemnon of
Aeschylus, the play that introduces the Furies, three years before, and
Lambert kept with her a sketchbook containing Cassandras invocation
to Apollo from the Agamemnon.42 Her nickname was, moreover, harpy,
bestowed, probably, by Rose Pulham owing to her frequent shrieks of
laughter, outrage or delight, or possibly by Giacometti, who liked to stress
her reputation as a devourer of men.43 She was very particular about
identifying the Furies as Erinyes, not Eumenides (their kindly manifesta-
tion in the Orestes story).44 In 1947 she wrote of herself to Rose Pulham:

two texts for a HARPIE that is provisionally Cosmopolitan:

You profit from all that you take and give back all you get.
A harpie in the hand is hard to hold but a harpie in the home is a haven from harm.45

Bacons Furies were adapted from a range of reproduced Surrealist

imagery such as Picassos biomorphs and Ernsts harpy image: Reve
dune Petite Fille Qui Voulut entre au carmel Marceline-Marie: Sous mon
 Carol Jacobi 299

Figure 2. Isabel Lambert,

Skeletons of Two Birds and a
Fish, oil on canvas, 610 760
mm, 19451948, private
collection.
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Blanc Vetement venez avec moi, pies et Harpies, Prenez des Charbons Ardents
dans vos Bec et . . . (192930 collage), and Schrenck Nomings se ance
photographs.46 Lambert, by contrast, was aligned with the embattled
minority position of figurative painters of the period, specifically
Giacometti (the other being Balthus), and worked mainly from nature.
Her earliest drawings took as their subjects creatures she came across in
the countryside or that were kept by her parents in the house: throughout
her life she collected, drew and painted skeletons and corpses, especially
birds. She sketched at zoos from the 1930s and drew the wildlife of
Australia in 1977. Her first oils for example, Skeletons of Two Birds and
a Fish (c.194548) (Figure 2) synthesize ideas of the harpy with bird
skeletons (which nearly everyone who knew her assumed she identified
with herself),47 several of which accompanied the poem in her sketch-
book. In the series of works put before the public at her first Hanover
 300 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

show, they rear and stalk, with fish, bats and shells, in ephemeral cages.
They evoke Giacomettis sculpture Palace at 4 am (1932),48 which he
described as a dorsal column in a cage and skeleton-birds flying high
up above the pool of clear, green water in which very fine, very white
skeletons of fish were swimming.49
Lamberts interest in animals, zoology and anthropology (and, in later
life, ecology) was complemented and catalysed by her contact with the
ethnographic ideas of Leiris and Bataille and their respect for data estab-
lished with a minimum of approximation.50 Giacometti had a full set of
the journal Documents, 192930, edited by Bataille, and he and Lambert
visited the Galerie dAnatomie Compare e and the Galerie de Paleontologie
in the Jardin des Plantes.51 Elizabeth Cowling has argued that Palace at 4 am
evokes memories of the Galerie de Paleontologie: great windows,
streaked with their black armature of bars, still glittering with the last
rays of sunlight, still disoriented.52 The erotic frisson she detects in the
history of life and death laid out in the museum, and the skeletal evidence
of death in the living, surely informs Lamberts ghostly figures.
The bird motif also synthesizes thoughts offered by Bataille on the
origin of art and man. He kept a folder of material concerning Georges
Montandons theories on the descent of man, including layer diagrams,
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Descendence ologenetigue de lhomme, and several copies of the

famous photograph of Dr Francois de Loys dead ape, temporarily
argued to be the missing link. With the items in Batailles folder was an
article in a 1929 copy of lAnthropologie which suggested that a bird
incised in a stone from the Upper Palaeolithic period, also reproduced in
Documents, represented the first work of art.53 Batailles later essay, Hegel, la
mort et le sacrifice (Hegel, death and sacrifice, 1955) clarified the connec-
tion between the origins and essence of man and the origin and essence of
consciousness through art, and returned to this motif: For Hegel, it is both
fundamental and worthy of amazement that human understanding (ie
language, discourse) should have had the strength (an incomparable
power) to separate its constitutive elements from the Totality . . . (this tree,
this bird, this stone).54 Lamberts isolated birds, at once detached signifiers
and anatomical actuality, explored Batailles understanding of the origin of
consciousness and knowledge as well the animal descent of man.
Batailles 1929 piece on Apocalypse in Documents 2 might appear to
have provided a common source for Bacons harpies and Lamberts
stalking birds (Figure 3). The anti-idealism of the essay was shared by
Bacon and Lambert. The idea of atheistic sacrifice, and the winged
murderers in the Apocalypse of Saint Sever manuscript that illustrated
it, synthesized classical and Christian myth in a similar way to Bacons
blurring of the Eumenides (Erinyes) with the attendants at the
Crucifixion.55 The gridded superimposition of rearing winged creatures
is like Lamberts birds, and their grotesque hybridity is reminiscent of
Bacons Furies. Batailles description of them as butchers, with the
physical optimism and enthusiasm for their work that characterises the
killers of the abattoir, also looks forward to Bacons mysterious
Painting 1946, which began, so he claimed, as a bird or chimpanzee,
only to become a beaming butcher.56
 Carol Jacobi 301

Figure 3. Anon., France,

Apocalypse, Locusts, detail
from The Apocalypse of Saint
Sever, 11th century, folio
145v, Biblioth`eque Nationale,
de France, Departement
des Manuscrits, Division-
Occidentale, Paris.
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Rosalind Krauss has pioneered a rethinking of Batailles relation to the art

of this period and Dawn Ades has noted that Bacon owned copies of
Documents and that he acknowledged a debt to the pictures of slaughter-
houses by Eli Lotar in its pages.57 Ades goes on to demonstrate a crucial
connection between his imagery and Batailles entry La Bouche, particularly
with respect to Three Figures. Batailles assertion, later in the same passage,
that human beings do not have a simple architecture like animals, and it is
not even possible to say where they begin and that strictly speaking they
start at the top of their skulls, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part58
also evokes the heads that dwindle above the mouth in Bacons Painting 1946
(1946), Head I (1948), and Head II and Head III (1949). There were, however,
thirteen years between the publication of Documents and the manifestation of
 302 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

these ideas in Bacons work and it seems likely that this was catalysed by
Lambert. An acknowledgment of her role is interesting because it reinforces
the likelihood that Bacon was reacting to French text as well as imagery and
raises the possibility that he was responding to both old ideas and recent
ones, perhaps not even published. More importantly, the lively, discursive
nature of the letters exchanged between Leiris and Bataille during this
period, as well as those between Lambert and Giacometti and Rose
Pulham, reminds us that Bacons responses should be understood not as
influence, but as participation in a debate in progress.
Lamberts lifelong focus on the skeleton and the corpse relates to the
famous slaughterhouse images and a later article, Theory of Religion, written
by Bataille in 1948, just after his closest intimacy with her.59 It is worth
quoting at length:

The human attitude towards the body is formidably complex. In so far as he is spirit, it is
mans misfortune to have the body of an animal and thus to be like a thing, but it is the glory of
the human body to be the substratum of the spirit . . . the body never ceases to be haunted . . . so
much so that if death reduces it to the level of a thing, the spirit is more present than ever . . . In
a sense the corpse is the most complete affirmation of the spirit. What deaths definitive
impotence and absence reveals is the very essence of the spirit, just as the scream of the one
that is killed is the supreme affirmation of life. Conversely, mans corpse reveals the complete
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reduction of the animal body, and therefore the living animal, to thinghood . . . a utility of the
same nature as canvas, iron, or timber.60

Bataille unites the thinghood of body, corpse and canvas, predicating an art
which evokes presence through absence, reflecting Giacomettis distinction
between sculpture as living presence and corpse. The scream partakes of the
body, a spasm rather than a statement. Bacons cry and Lamberts skeletons
explore the theme they are the figure made figural to affirm life.61
Lamberts familiarity with Documents at this time is exhibited in her
playful emulation of its style in Il Mondo Libero (a propaganda magazine
for newly liberated Italy which she edited between 1944 and 1945), parti-
cularly in her fondness for finding pretexts to introduce British bulls in
unexpected combinations an anxious meaty specimen looks over
Raphaels Deposition, for example, while a pub sign is elevated on curlicues
opposite his Ascension.62 The bull is, of course, a Bataillian motif, central to
his novel Story of the Eye first published in 1928, which Bacon had read.
Lambert reused the bull motif as an erotic totem, six times life-size, in her
startling blue set for Tiresias (1950, Royal Opera House). Bacon seems to
allude to these credentials in his inclusion of a bull form and brilliant blue
ground in Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho (1967).
The year 1943, in which Bacons engagements with Lamberts circle, with
myth and with Batailles ideas about the body seem to be coming about, also
marked the beginning of his interest in representational painting and tech-
nique, a practice which was to take him away from mainstream modernism
for the remainder of his career. The change is in marked sympathy with
Lamberts minority commitment to the figure, human or animal, in its most
material sense, particularly her interrogation of appearance. At the
Liverpool School of Art she was a part of a small group of students who
drew each other to maximize study from the nude (although these works
 Carol Jacobi 303

had to be hidden), a subject she came back to whenever she had models, in
the 1930s and 1940s at la Grande Chaumie` re or at male artists studios; from
the 1950s she had friends or paid sitters and was given unprecedented access
to moving bodies in the mirrored practice room at the Royal Ballet; in 1961 a
visit to Africa offered posed and unposed models. Bacons bodies after 1943,
such as Man Standing, begin to build up partial appearance with cumulative
marks, akin to Giacomettis recent style or Lamberts Portrait of Dylan
Thomas, or Walter Sickert.63 His grisaille suggests a desire to address form,
although it is only superficially like the work of Lambert or Giacometti,
deriving largely from monochrome photographic sources.64 More revealing
is Bacons engagement with space. Lambert and Rose Pulham conceive of
setting or landscape as environment. Works such as Bacons Figure Getting
out of a Car, recorded in Rose Pulhams 1943 photograph, feature architec-
tural detail similar to Balthus or Rose Pulhams interiors, and its reworked
version, Figure in Landscape (c.1945) was the first to locate the figure within
the famous space frame. Balthus, who knew all the parties, was convinced
Giacomettis Palace at 4 am was its source, but this could have been mediated
by Lamberts networks.65 Her 1940s grids, derived from Giacometti, zoo
cages and the scaffolds of post-war buildings, place her figures slightly out
of place as they slip outside the lines.66
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Lambert lived in France from 1945 to late 1947, while Bacon spent most of
his time in Monte Carlo. In the first two weeks of November 1946 he stayed
at her hotel, the Hotel St Romain, Rue St Roche. It is significant that apart
from a Unesco exhibition featuring his own work, uppermost in his corre-
spondence was an intention to see Balthus figurative show at the
Wildenstein Gallery.67 The visit marked a revision of his negotiation with
the figurative, however. Lambert was sceptical about Balthus ideas and
preferred Giacomettis struggle with figuration per se. Bacon was perhaps
reflecting an accord found with Lambert when he reported to Sutherland his
reaction to what he had seen in Paris. The enthusiasm for Picasso had gone,
he was impatient with the Unesco show and he had reconsidered Balthus.
What had been marvellous and so disturbing became an interesting
revelation of the limits of illustration. Bacon came to the famous conclusion
that the tenderness which we would all love to get for a change . . . cant be
done that way it can only come as a technical thing. He was rejecting the
terrible decoration we are all contaminated by in which he included his
own work: I feel more and more that nothing matters or will happen until
someone makes a new technical synthesis that can carry over from sensa-
tion to our nervous system.68
What did Bacon mean by tenderness in this context? I would suggest
that he meant touching, in the sense of an intimacy, presence, an encounter
with the real. His engagement with figurative technique had led to an
engagement with figuration itself and a dialogue with those artists, writers
and thinkers who were testing the limits of figuration (Giacometti) and of
knowledge itself (Bataille, Leiris, Sartre). Ideas of human descent, ritual,
sovereignty and essence went hand in hand with the arguments of phe-
nomenology, linking being to the struggle to know and represent. The
urgency of these issues lay in their responsiveness to recent events and
their practical implications for the individuals self-definition, behaviour,
 304 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

and relation to a post-war world. Sartres dismissal of pre-existing moral

codes and assertion that mans responsibility lay in seeking his own
essence, defining himself and his age by his actions, turned the artist
(epitomized, for Sartre, by Giacometti) into the paradigm for authentic
existence, and the figure into the pre-eminent subject of art.69
The application of the broad term Existentialism has positioned Sartre in
such a way as to obscure the heterogeneity of this period. Recently, Robin
Spencer has revealed Giacomettis pre-war return to figuration, in which
Lambert was involved, as a precocious exploration of philosophical and
phenomenological ideas beyond Hegel, a decade before Sartre published in
1943.70 Bataille too was producing considerations of phenomenology and its
existential implications from 1940.71 Giacometti met and became close to
Sartre in 1941 and Lambert knew him and Simone de Beauvoir, but at the
time of Bacons visit she was also seeing other players in the movement:
Giacometti, Bataille, Ayer, Leiris, Merleau-Ponty and others of Les Temps
Modernes.72 She lived a few doors away from the headquarters of the maga-
zine with the avant-garde composer Leibovitz, another of its contributors.
Earlier in the year the couple had gone to stay with the post-Hegelian
philosopher Jean Wahl.73 She had known Francis Gruber, one of the figurative
artists being embraced by the existentialists and exhibiting at the main venue
for these, the Galerie Rene Drouin, since before the war.74 In 1946, bilingual
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Lambert, together with Bacon, was experiencing this moment as a debate in

full swing. Their reactions were not instances of influence, the kind of con-
nection that Bacon spent his life fending off, but participations, at the cutting
edge of post-war culture.
The coincidence of Sartres celebration of Giacomettis paradigmatic struggle
in his humble studio/cave and the artists New York show might have spurred
Lambert and Bacons adoption of similar practice and lifestyle (Lamberts
studio from 1953 to her death was as modest and accumulated with detritus
as Giacomettis and Bacons, though further from metropolitan life).75 Bacons
decisive announcement of his desire to link technique directly to the nervous
system complements the ideas behind his imagery of the cry, and takes on
Giacomettis various claims to want to give the nearest possible sensation, the
matie` re painting of the artists exhibiting at the Galerie Drouin, and Jean
Paulhans commentaries in Les Temps Modernes. The details of this dialogue
cannot be done justice here, but Bacons in camera motifs and their develop-
ment within the enclosed privacy of the small studio can be understood as an
application of the phenomenological bracketing technique, epoche. Lambert
lightly adopted the term Quintessentialism for the phenomenological
approach, a cats cradle to be slung between reality and /the/ transforma-
tion of it into terms of paint and a flat surface. She goes on: all the difficulties of
this art reach their summit in the human form. / For me all the problems are
practical and the implications, are included in their execution. [Francis . . .
seems to agree about this tho, as you know, fascinating as his conversation is, it
is very difficult to understand EXACTLY what he means . . .]76
Bacon had far less training in life drawing than Lambert and approached
immediacy through different routes; photography was one way, and
another was sophisticated representational painting by other artists.77
Lambert eschewed photography, but shared Bacons curiosity and respect
 Carol Jacobi 305

for the qualities of uncanny presence in certain works of art of the past,
particularly Egyptian, Roman and Northern Renaissance. Her attempts to
capture this in versions of the Roman double portrait A Baker and his Wife in
her Portrait of a Pompeian Couple (c.1949) (see Figure 1) recall Bacons con-
temporaneous exploration of Vela zquezs Innocent X. Bacon essayed a paint-
ing from life in 1951, Portrait of Lucian Freud. Lambert commented in 1950:
What a curious figure he is! He now wants to paint portraits of living
people. Is going to do one of Lucian for the Festival competition they are
bound to look at it if its Lucian even Kenneth Clarke.78 The picture was
modified, brought away from the real to return to it more forcefully, as
Bacon tended to put it, through a photograph of Franz Kafka. Lamberts 1952
Portrait of Muriel Belcher (Figure 4) used the double portrait and Egyptian art
in a similar way, anticipating Bacons later characterization of Belcher as a
sphinx. She depicted the sitter as a pale, archaic bust, with an oracle-like
gaze, but curtailed at the shoulders and placed on a table, accompanied by
its reflection gazing elsewhere. Bacon always claimed, like Lambert and
Giacometti, that Egyptian art was supreme79 and his first sustained work
from a seated model, Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa (Lisa Sainsbury, 1955) is
similar to Lamberts Belcher and Giacomettis white plaster head of Lambert,
the so-called Egyptian Portrait of Isabel (1936). The Sainsburys were, interest-
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ingly, also patrons and models to Giacometti. They later purchased a bronze
of Isabel. In 1955 Bacon is, however, unlikely to have seen it in anything other
than a photograph, and synthesizes Lisas likeness with the slanted features
from another reproduction of Queen Nefertiti (1340 BC).
Lambert and Bacons most conspicuous collaboration after 1947 was in
their investigation of the working qualities of materials. Lamberts letters
between 1948 and 1951 reveal extended struggles with and discussions
about supports, paint and additives that complemented their experiments
with consistency and the retention of gesture and accident, with surface,
pastel, sand and low relief. A letter to Rose Pulham of Christmas 1950 is
typical; she lists her problems, including:

How to make ones [sic] paintings really visible

How to eliminate the excess of oil and how to retain the freedom of the brushstroke while
producing a surface that will reflect the light rather than absorbing it.80

Bacons extraordinary technical achievements have been extensively ana-

lysed by many commentators, particularly Sylvester and Deleuze, and are
currently undergoing scientific research.81 Lamberts search for presence in
paint successfully materializes in her baboons, Male Baboon (Figure 5) and
Female Baboon and Child, made immediately after the first Hanover show. The
allocation of gender in the titles, the fact that the animals are not it, is
significant. The male crouches like a primal Adam, or Newton (William
Blake, 1795/c.1805), to remind us of Montandons missing link. The figure
wavers between representation and its lack. He emerges illogically from
almost random strokes, barely out of the dust (what Bataille called the
totality), and nearly absorbed back, erased by the very marks that signify
him. His face, simultaneously in profile and turned towards us, is at once
alienated, aggressive and appealing. His distressed surfaces communicate a
 306 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

Figure 4. Isabel Lambert,

Portrait Bust with Mirror
Reflection (Muriel Belcher),
1952, oil on canvas
(unsupported), 89 114 cm,
private collection.
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sense of existential embattlement, Batailles scandal of matter or the lines of

Antonin Artaud: We are not yet born, we are not yet in the world, there is
not yet a world, things have not yet been made, the reason for being has not
yet been found.82
It is likely that Bacon accompanied Lambert to London Zoo, given records
of his frequent visits to her home at Albany Terrace, Regents Park and the
appearance in his output at this point of simian imagery, blended into Head I
(19471948) and Head II (1949), isolated in Study of Baboon (1953) and
Chimpanzee (1955). Although Lamberts method relied on observing these
models and Bacons did not, they shared Batailles ideas on the common
denominator of the figure, an embodied consciousness in the world, in
dialectical existence with it, prior to or beyond mediation, sovereign, articu-
lated by the cry or the animal body. Their related ethnographic, phenomen-
ological, materialist slant will reward further research.
 Carol Jacobi 307
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Figure 5. Isabel Lambert, Male Baboon, c.1950, 60 90 cm, oil and sand on canvas, private collection.

Telling tales
Absence of narrative became a talisman of Bacons art and his statements
about it, and a central creed of Bacon studies. Paintings crafted to enhance the
facts of their constituents (fluids flow, emulsions clog, canvas, pinioned to
wood, stretches into encrusted, soaked or raw planes) smuggle signs deftly
past language directly to the nervous system. Absence of speech is commonly
ascribed to seeing a Bacon painting.83 Such works exist beyond the single
encounter, however, and speech and text have been spectacularly forthcom-
ing. As Marc Shell has shown, the social value of most art lies not in its
material constituents, but in its shared signifying potential, its stories.84 My
point is that however much we celebrate non-illustration in theory, illustra-
tion is present, essential, in practice, necessary for images to be represented
and exchanged, within specialist academic communities as well as commerce,
the media and popular culture. In the case of Bacon, elaborative narratives
from outside the frame fulfil the function of those absent on the canvas.
Lambert, by contrast, never told her story. Late interviews disappointed
visitors in search of celebrity and her autobiography was unfinished. Until
now, the hundreds of pictures that she left at her death have been
 308 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

represented only by catalogues and reviews. The sense of risk she experi-
enced in showing her work was connected to this reluctance to mediate; a
commitment to the necessity of an art that will communicate for itself, to
art as affect rather than illustration. She asked Rose Pulham and Leiris to
write catalogue notes because she knew they shared this philosophy and
would omit explanations.85
Art that excluded itself from the grand narrative of abstraction during its
heyday and also eschewed straightforward illustration was, however,
particularly in need of mediating myths. Bacon turned this to his advan-
tage, constructing an image of absolute singularity (untutored, instinctive,
gambler with paint) and unimpeachable authenticity (pursuer of the
unvarnished real). This was amplified by anecdotes about his life so
vivid that it is now nearly impossible to approach the works without
them.86 The phenomenon has suited art history, which is after all a dis-
cipline devoted entirely to transforming objects into texts. Although
Lambert shared Bacons commitment to non-illustrational figurative art,
she did not address the professional problems it raised. Her talking and
writing about art were no less copious: nights in Saint-Germain with the
foremost intellectuals of her day, fierce debates within the cultural elite of
London, and long epistolary exchanges with Giacometti and Rose Pulham
but they remained private. As a result, while Lamberts illustrational
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decors for ballet and opera were discussed, celebrated, and in use until the
1990s,87 her scrupulously enigmatic paintings remained only paintings;
without narrative frameworks, their silence generated silence.
Lamberts diffidence might yet have gathered its own cultural myths, if
her likeness and persona had not been so fabulously commandeered by
others: by the paintings, sculptures and biographies of Epstein, Derain,
Giacometti, Picasso and Bacon, as well as those of her three famous hus-
bands. Accounts of other artists naturally supplement the works of their
protagonists, so Lambert is recorded mainly as a sitter. In 2008 her name
became the occasion of a joint exhibition, Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers:
Portraits by Giacometti and Bacon, that contained nothing by her hand.88 In the
absence of regular shows she grew better known for her appearances in
Bacons story, his carnivalesque gatherings, the pictures he painted and the
photographs he commissioned from John Deakin. She participated in his
post-existential Camelot, while allowing her own famous glamour to lapse.
Daniel Farsons 1993 book The Gilded Gutter Life of Bacon, and its 1998 off-
shoot, the film Love is the Devil, describe her laughing, shrieking, imbibing
exemplar of the always-open Baconian mouth. These images have passed
into popular culture, along with a host of animal metaphors associating her
with appetite and carnality. Giacomettis biographer, James Lord, to whom
the Piccadilly Circus remark was addressed, finds it no more difficult to
imagine her striding stark naked in the street than lurking in a lush
Sumatran jungle . . . unafraid and menacing.89
Lambert became a vanitas, a validation of Bacons mortal themes. Signs
of maturity, conflated with signs of dissipation, were constantly and
cruelly compared with the siren, Schiaparelli-clad figure of her youth, a
life of uninhibited exuberance until the onslaught of old age.90 This
picture, like that of Dorian Grey, promotes an image of Bacon as
 Carol Jacobi 309

perpetually young. Time and again journalists and writers return to his
uncanny perpetuation of protean energy and good looks. The myth of
Bacons heroic expenditure requires transference of its losses onto others.
His risks and consumption remain exhilarating only in so far as the abuse,
the addictions are manifested elsewhere Lambert, Deakin, Peter Lacy,
George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes and others become ciphers of cost.
This formula is a characteristic exaggeration (it is always surprising to
remember that Moraes outlived Bacon, dying at sixty-seven), at least in the
case of Lambert. After the hedonism of her glittering marriage to Constant, she
was grateful to withdraw to the country and more at home there than in the
Colony Room.91 Bacon, too, had various rural addresses, including a house in
Essex, about forty-five minutes drive from her thatched cottage. Muriel,
characterized most frequently as the sphinx-like keeper of the Colony code,
was a friend outside the club, a visitor to Lamberts home and studio from the
late 1940s.92 The stress on drinking and wit in popular accounts obscures the
attraction of established relationships, genuine conversation and social habits
developed in the dangerous and depleted days during and after a war.
The mutually complementary legends of Bacons and Lamberts alcohol
consumption are also over-determined. Both were hard drinkers, even for
their generation, but this rarely went without an equally enthusiastic pursuit
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of good food. They shared a lifelong love of cookery, encouraged by

Lamberts determination to bring French finesse to wartime rations. There
were problems with alcohol, but they were also known to feign drunkenness
when it suited them. Lambert tells a story of doing this to get out of an all-
too-predictable orgy at the Batailles,93 and a particularly good performance
of Bacons has been immortalized on the South Bank Show.94 More signifi-
cantly, both artists watched two of their three partners, and many friends,
succumb to alcoholism. Constants death from diabetes and delirium tre-
mens in 1951 was followed in uncanny mimicry by Alans in 1971, only three
months after the suicide of Bacons lover, George Dyer. Other intimates,
Rose Pulham, MacNeice, Thomas and the poet Randall Swingler, died in
their fifties from similar causes. The fact that Lambert and Bacon outlived so
many who were close to them and worked until their deaths (despite
operations to their eyes), at 79 and 82 respectively, three months apart,
suggests a degree of control over their lives and bodies.
Although it is beyond argument that Lamberts narrative became an
important supplement to Bacons, it is difficult to know how far the appro-
priation of her persona was deliberate on his part. Certainly it seemed to suit
him to publicize her role as muse rather than maker, telling Paris Match in
1985: You know, I also made love to Isabel Rawsthorne, a very beautiful
woman who was Derains model and Georges Batailles girlfriend.95
However reliable this statement may be, it does reveal the importance to
him in later life of Lamberts linking role to other great men. In promoting
her pedigree as muse, Bacon helped to obscure her history as artist. Bacon
and Lambert attended each others openings with loyal punctuality
(Figure 6), but seem to have been restrained in their praise of each
others work, comfortable about disagreement and common ground, con-
centrating on practical problems. Lambert is probably the deliverer of the
criticism that Bacon tells David Sylvester he has found so much more
 310 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

helpful than praise. She is also likely to be the exception to the majority of
his artist friends, whom he feels he cannot criticize, but her name is not
mentioned in the interview.96 As a painter she received identical treatment
to any figure who might disturb Bacons carefully constructed singularity.
Her fate is paralleled by that which William Vaughan ascribes to John
Deakin, an acknowledged and successful photographer whose association
with Bacon left him with a reputation as a low-life snapper. Vaughan notes
the way Bacons famous descriptions of photography as mere illustration
and the images he commissioned from Deakin as data for his paintings
subtly diminished the photographers creative input.97 Bacons margin-
alization of Lambert took another form. From 1963, he entitled pictures of
her Isabel Rawsthorne. Lambert had chosen not to take her third hus-
bands name. She had built up her reputation as Isabel Lambert and
continued to sign her work IAL, only scrawling her married name in
longhand on a few pictures in the 1990s. Bacons nineteen pictures of her
eclipsed the Lambert persona. Late interviews and obituaries presented
her as Rawsthorne, Bacons model and Alans wife, and featured images of
her rather than by her. She became also a designer and painter, or only a
designer, her art barely described and never named.98 The most dramatic
instance of this is a posthumous exhibition at the Michael Parkin Gallery in
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July 1998. It was entitled Isabel Rawsthorne Painting the Ballet and was
introduced not by any account of the work in the show, but by Paolozzis
memoir which celebrated her entirely as model and beauty.99
It is unlikely that Bacons gallery was responsible for changing the name;
Lambert did not exhibit in her lifetime as Isabel Rawsthorne and her
Marlborough show was no exception. It may or may not be significant that
a note on the back of one of the many photographs of Lambert found in
Bacons studio after his death underlines the surname: Isabel Rawsthorne,100
and she was always known as Mrs Rawsthorne at Bacons favourite restau-
rant, Wheelers. Farson and Peppiatt cite instances of Bacons manipulation of
models, friends and enemies alike, and several commentators have typed

Figure 6. Francis Bacon and

Georges Dyer at Private View of
Isabel Lambert Recent
Paintings, Marlborough
Gallery, 1968, photographer
unknown. # Biddy Noakes.
 Carol Jacobi 311

George Dyer as the victim-muse, doomed, like a latter-day Lizzie Siddall, to

fulfil a self-destructive role fabricated by the artist. Love is the Devil isolated this
trait for dramatic impact. Vaughan warns against this over-simple reading,
however, and I agree. Such negative characterizations are themselves a pro-
duct of the courtly logic of the dominant Bacon narrative, the idea of Bacon as
originator and centre of all things. Inevitably, other players are over-simplified
and not given credit for their own sovereignty or their own stories. An
independent look at Lamberts tale might replace the Camelot model with
something more like a cats cradle, a weave of intersections.

Acknowledgement
This research could not have been done without the support of the
National Portrait Gallery and the Leverhulme Trust, who far-sightedly
inaugurated and funded this investigation. I am also grateful to Martin
Harrison and many colleagues, to friends of Isabel, Juliet Ryan, Edward
and Judith Williams and Pattie Lambert and most of all to Biddy Noakes.

Notes
1 The only published account of Isabel Lamberts (Rawsthorne) art to date is Suzanne Doyles
perceptive and pioneering study in the catalogue for the 1997/98 exhibitions at the Mercer Art Gallery
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and October Gallery, Isabel Rawsthorne 19121992, Paintings, Drawings and Designs (Harrogate: Mercer
Art Gallery, 1997). Scholarship has since been advanced by V. Wiesinger in Alberto Giacometti, and

Isabel Nicholas, Correspondances (Paris: Fage Editions, Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, 2007)
and V. Wiesinger and M. Harrison, Isabel and other Intimate Strangers (New York: Gagosian Galley,
2008). This essay is indebted to all three authors.
2 H. Davies, Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years 19281958 (London: Garland, 1978). Recent research
into this area includes: M. Harrison, In Camera Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting
(London: Thames & Hudson, 2006); M. Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland (London: Yale University Press,
2005); A. Baldassari, Bacon Picasso: The Life of Images (Paris: Rizzoli/Reunion des Musees Nationaux,
2005); B. Steffen, ed., Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art [catalogue] (Vienna/Basle: Skira, 2004).
3 Daniel Farson outlines a general distain for other artists in The Gilded Gutter Life of Bacon (London: Century,
1993), 34, 98100, as does M. Peppiatt in Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1996) (London: Constable, 2008),
3512. Hammer provides a nuanced analysis of transformations in Bacons representations of his
relationship with Sutherland in Bacon and Sutherland, and Harrison describes specific marginalization of
encounters with abstract artists in St Ives in In Camera Francis Bacon, 139.
4 Roger Manvell, New Statesman and Nation, 23 February 1946, 31.
5 For an autobiographical outline of 1912 to 1960, see Isabel Lambert, unpublished memoirs, Tate
Archive MS 9612/2/14.
6 W. Nicholas (brother), letter to author, 15 May 2009.
7 J. Rose, Demons and Angels: A Life of Jacob Epstein (London: Carroll & Graf, 2002), 186190, and in
conversation with the author.
8 Davies, Francis Bacon, 1618; Harrison, In Camera Francis Bacon, 2833; Peppiatt, Bacon, 90.
9 Apart from providing a hedonistic Right Bank life, travel and worldly education, Delmer helped
Lamberts mother send her brother, Warwick Nicholas, to a good school; he became a world-
renowned zoologist.
10 Lambert rarely lost touch with her lovers, remaining close to all of them except Epstein. My Tom
(Delmer) is mentioned frequently in her letters, and in later years, he settled near her home in Essex.
11 Isabel Lambert, unpublished memoirs, Tate Archive MS 9612.2.4.33. The mismatch between the
familiarity recorded in the letters and the near silence on Bacon in the memoirs may be a result of
respect for Bacons reserve on autobiographical matters, especially as, unlike many other characters in
her life, he was living at the time of writing. The notes have been expurgated and pages cut out, in
some parts concerning Bacon or Giacometti, whose wife, Annette, was also still living.
12 Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, 7.
13 Rose Pulham moved to Oakley Street, closer to Glebe Place, the following year and eventually to Flood
Street, a road or so on.
14 T. Fitzgibbon, With Love: An Autobiography 193846 (London: Pan, 1982), 137.
15 Lambert and Paolozzi were together in Paris in spring 1947 (P. Lambert, notebook, Lambert
Collection, 6 and 10; also W. Nicholas [brother], letter to author, 15 May 2009).
 312 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

16 A. Coleman, Isabel Lambert, Dancers in Action, Paintings, Drawings, Stage Designs [catalogue] (London:
October Gallery, 1986). Alix Coleman was a close friend of Lambert in later life.
17 Fitzgibbon, With Love, 35.
18 J. Rothenstein and R Alley, Francis Bacon, Catalogue Raisonne and Documentation (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1964), Appendix, A4.
19 24 August 1950; letter to P. Rose Pulham, 5 September 1950, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.40.
20 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, 30 December 1950, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.43. Lambert and Rose Pulham
knew Peter Watson and Cyril Connolly in Paris before the war; Fitzgibbon, With Love, 19.
21 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, 30 December 1950.
22 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, Christmas 1948, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.16.
23 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, June 1949? Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.31.
24 Letters to P. Rose Pulham, December 1948, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.14 and 9612.1.3.15; similar
arguments took place at the Penroses in 1950, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.35.
25 Fragment letter to P. Rose Pulham, 1950? Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.51.
26 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, date unknown, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.30.
27 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, 3 July 1949, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.33.
28 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, June 1949, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.31.
29 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, late 1948, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.13.
30 J. Lord, A Gift for Admiration, Further Memoirs (Farrar Straus & Giroux: New York, 1998), 69.
31 Peppiatt, Bacon, 240.
32 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, 21 September 1949, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.68.
33 Bacon, interview, Paris Match, 1985, quoted in D. Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Bacon (London:
Century, 1993), 167.
34 The country home of Robert Heber-Percy, with whom Bacon travelled to Africa in 1951. Letter to P.
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Rose Pulham, 19 November 1950, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.41. Daniel Farson reports Ian Board,
barman and later proprietor of the Colony Room, recalling sexual intimacies taking place in the club,
in The Gilded Gutter Life of Bacon, 167.
35 B. Noakes, in conversation with the author, November 2007.
36 Lambert described being bombed during a dinner party with Ian Fleming in 1940 in her unpublished
memoirs, Tate Archive MS 9612/2/14, p 23; Peppiatt, Bacon, 240.
37 See Leiris to Lambert correspondence, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.1; Lambert sends Leiris photographs of
her work and he sends her manuscripts of his, see letter to Giacometti, ?1948, in Wiesinger, Alberto
Giacometti, 99; letter to P. Rose Pulham, April1949, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.18.
38 Reinforced, perhaps, by the reprinting of Rose Pulhams series of artists in their studios, showing
Picasso, Dali, Mesens, Derain, Ernst, Balthus, Berman and Cocteau, in Lilliput 13, October 1943, 32330,
later extended to include Sutherland and others.
39 In Oakley Street; Fitzgibbon, With Love, 96.
40 Lambert and Rose-Pulham are considered with Bacon and other artists in M. Harrison, Transition: The
London Art Scene in the Fifties (London: Merrel and Barbican Art, 2002), 35, 55. For an invaluable
account of Rose Pulham, see D. Mellor and V. Williams, Too Short a Summer: The Photographs of Peter
Rose Pulham 19101956 (London: Impressions Gallery, 1978).
41 J. Rayner was a friend of Bernard Berenson; see his extraordinary wartime correspondence with
Lambert, Tate Archive MS 9612 .1.1.10.
42 P. Rose Pulham, Isabel Lambert, in Isabel Lambert [catalogue] (London: Hanover Gallery, 1949).
43 J. Lord, A Gift for Admiration: Further Memoirs (Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, 1998), 43.
44 A later discussion of the term, in a phase of renewed interest in the subject, occurs in a letter to P. Rose
Pulham, 7 August 1955, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.93.
45 Letter to P. and M. Rose Pulham; letter to P. Rose Pulham Spring 1947, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.4.
46 This and several further sources, including Degas, are demonstrated in Harrison, In Camera Francis
Bacon, 3844.
47 In conversation with the author B. Noakes, November 2007; J. Ryan, April 2009; E. Stamper, May 2009.
48 D. Ades, Web of Images, in Francis Bacon, ed. D. Ades and A. Forge [catalogue] (Tate Gallery: London,
1985), 20.
49 A. Giacometti, Minotaure, nos. 3 and 4, 12 December 1933; reprinted in Alberto Giacometti, Ecrits,
presented by Michel Leiris and Jacques Dupin (Paris: Hermann, 1990), 17, 19.
50 M. Leiris, letter to Bataille, 6 June 1939, in George Bataille and Michel Leiris Correspondence, trans. L.
Heron (Oxford: Seagull Books, 2008), 33.
51 R. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1985), 60, n.39.
 Carol Jacobi 313

52 A. Giacometti, Paris sans fin, in Leiris and Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, Ecrits, 92, translated in E.
Cowling, Elective Affinities: Giacometti in the Palace of Bones, Apollo, October 2003, 3442.
53 G. Montandon, Lologenisme, Extrait de la Revue Scientifique, 26 January 1929, Biblioth`eque Nationale,
Georges Bataille MS, X9 21; Seance du 20 june 1928, lAnthropologie 39, nos 1/3, 1929, Institut Francais
DAnthropologie, Bibliotheque Nationale, Georges Bataille MS, X9 22; the stone is reproduced in D.
Ades and S. Baker, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006), 129. Lamberts interest in the origins of man did not extend to sharing any of Montandons racist
views; they worked for opposite sides during the war.
54 G. Bataille, Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice, Oeuvres Compl`etes 12 (Paris: Gallimard, 197188), 331.
55 C. Millers analysis of the Picasso and Batailles appropriation of this manuscript (beyond
iconography) has interesting bearing on Bacons use of it. Bataille with Picasso: Crucifixion (1930) and
Apocalypse, in Papers of Surrealism 7 [special issue: The Use-Value of Documents], 2007.
56 Referred to by Bacon as a butchers shop picture derived from a chimpanzee and/or a bird; F. Bacon
in D. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson 2008), 11.
57 R. Krauss, Michel, Bataille et moi, October 68 (Spring 1994), 320; Ades, Web of Images, 20.
58 G. Battaille, Bouche, in Oeuvres Completes 1, 237.
59 Lamberts relationship with Bataille is confirmed by E. Williams in Isabel Rawsthorne (19121992),
the address delivered at Lamberts funeral, Thaxted Parish Church, 4 February 1992, and by
correspondence for example, postcard to P. Rose Pulham, Vezelay, undated, Tate Archive MS
9612.1.3.8, and L. Bataille, letter to Balthus, Vezelay, early September 1947, collection Thadee
Klossowski de Rola; unpublished autobiography, Noakes Collection, 81.
60 G. Bataille, Theory of Religion (1948), trans. R. Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), 40.
61 J. Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksiek, 1972), cited in G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of
Sensation (1981), trans. D Smith (London: Continuum, 2008), 2.
62 Il Mondo Libero, ed. I. Lambert, September 1944, 18; Il Mondo Libero, November 1844, 25. Thanks to
Martin Harrison for providing access to the copies in his collection.
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63 A trait identified by L. Alloway in the work of the 1950s, in Dr Nos Bacon, Art News and Review, 9
23 April 1960, 4; see Rebecca Daniels essay, Francis Bacon and Walter Sickert: Images which
Unlock other Images, in Francis Bacon: New Studies Centenary Essays, ed. M. Harrison (Go ttingen:
Steidl, 2009 [December]).
64 Especially Bacons Untitled (Elongated Walking Figure), 1949, oil on canvas, 152 116 cm, Dublin City
Art Gallery, The Hugh Lane.
65 M. Peppiatt, interview with Raymond Mason, Paris, October 1993, cited in Peppiatt, Bacon, 350.
66 M. Harrison, Landscape with Car lot notes, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christies, 20 June 2007.
Possibilities for connecting Bacon with Lamberts Parisian figurative circle are also suggested by L.
Alloways debate, Points of View: Bacon and Balthus [report of ICA discussion], Arts News and
Review, 26 January 1952, 7.
67 F. Bacon, letter to G. Sutherland, 19 October 1946, quoted in Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, 237.
68 F. Bacon, letter to G Sutherland, 30 December1946, quoted in Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, 238.
69 See Frances Morris, ed., Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 194555 (London: Tate Gallery, 1994) for a
survey of this moment.
70 R. Spencer, Giacomettis Break with Surrealism: Abstraction, Hegelianism and the Communicating
Vase, in Giacometti: Critical Essays, ed. Peter Read (London: Ashgate, 2009), 6386; see also D.
Rutimann, Cezanne & Giacometti: Paths of Doubt (Louisiana: Hatje Cantz, 2008).
71 For example, G. Bataille, Inner Experience (LExperience interieure), trans. L Boldt (New York: Urzone, 1989).
72 Lambert writes to Rose Pulham on Les Temps Modernes-headed paper in 1946, Tate Archive MS
9612.1.3.2.
73 P. Lambert, notebook, Lambert Collection, 6.
74 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, 7 August 1855, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.93.
75 H. Westley, The Body as Medium and Metaphor (Amsterdam/New York: Rudopi, 2008), 65.
76 Lamberts Quintessentialism is defined by P. Rose Pulham in Isabel Lambert, in Isabel Lambert
[catalogue], and described further in several letters between the two; here I quote Lambert, letter to P.
Rose Pulham, 3 July 1949, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.27.
77 H. Davies mentions Ford Madox Browns The Last of England (1855), oil on panel 82.5 74.9 cm,
Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, in Francis Bacon, 72; Lamberts particular fondness for Hans
Holbeins The Ambassadors (1533, oil on wood 207 209.5 cm, National Gallery, London) could also be
another source for Bacons curtain imagery about this time. Bacons exploration of forms of realism
through the photographic or cinematic image is investigated in Harrison, In Camera Francis Bacon and
D. Mellor, Film Fantasy, History in Francis Bacon, in M. Gale and C. Stephens, eds., Francis Bacon
(London: Tate, 2008), 5083.
78 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, 30 December 1950, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.43.
79 Peppiatt, Bacon, 168.
 314 cats cradle francis bacon and the art of isabel rawsthorne

80 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, 30 December 1950, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.43.

81 J. Russell, forthcoming PhD, Northumbria University; Lamberts Male Baboon and Female Baboon and
Child are also undergoing technical research under A. Burnstock, in the Department of Conservation &
Technology, Courtauld Institute of Art.
82 A. Artaud, I Hate and Renounce as a Coward (1946), trans. D. Rattray, in Anthology, A Artaud (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 226.
83 For example, A. Forge, About Bacon, in Francis Bacon [catalogue] (London: Tate/Abrams 1985), 28.
84 M. Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the
Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 1.
85 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, late 1948, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.13.
86 What painter has talked more about his art? asked W. Vaughan in Overexposed? The Model in
British Figurative Art, in Model and Supermodel: The Artists Model in British Art and Culture, ed. J.
Desmarais, M. Postle and W. Vaughan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 112.
87 Still preserved in the Royal Ballet collection.
88 Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Portraits by Giacometti and Bacon, Gagosian Gallery, Madison
Avenue, New York, December 2008.
89 Lord, Gift for Admiration; see also Peppiatt, Bacon, 204; Farson, Gilded Gutter Life, 165.
90 Farson, Gilded Gutter Life, 165. This and J. Lord, Giacometti: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1983)
are perhaps the two texts that established Lamberts popular persona, since circulated in most
accounts of her for example, H. Moraes, The Curse of the Drinking Classes, Independent, 6 April
1996; Isabel Rawsthorne [obituary], Daily Telegraph, 29 January 1992; N. Ahad, The Woman Who was
a Walking Work of Art, Isabel Rawsthorne, Yorkshire Post, August 15, 2008.
91 This image of her is in E. Williams description of Lamberts life, Isabel Rawsthorne (19121992), the
address delivered at Lamberts funeral, Thaxted Parish Church, 4 February 1992, and in Lamberts
later correspondence for example, about a visit to London for a revival of her Electra she writes:
Intend to see Francis if I can before I shut myself up with my geese (Lambert, letter to P. Lambert,
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April 1977); on another occasion she has a small dinner with Francis and Michel Leiris at Sonia
Orwells in Paris, while Francis is resting after a serious operation on his gall bladder (Lambert, letter
to P. Lambert, January 1985, private collection).
92 Letter to P. Rose Pulham, 30 December 1950, Tate Archive MS 9612.1.3.43; letter to Elizabeth Lutyens,
spring 1952? MS British Library, 55.
93 Unpublished autobiography, Noakes Collection, 81.
94 The South Bank Show: Francis Bacon, directed by David Hinton, presented by Melvyn Bragg, ITV, 1985.
95 Bacon, interview, Paris Match, quoted in Farson, Gilded Gutter Life, 167.
96 F. Bacon in Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 67.
97 Vaughan, Overexposed?, 114.
98 Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 29 January 1992; Evening Standard, 14 January 1998; Rachel Campbell-
Johnson, The Times, 2 February 1998.
99 E. Paolozzi, in Isabel Rawsthorne Painting the Ballet [catalogue] (London: Michael Parkin Gallery, 1998).
100 Isabel Rawsthorne Profile, c.1960s. Photograph by John Deakin. Collection Hugh Lane Gallery # The
Estate of Francis Bacon RM98F 16:113.