The Designer Before the Painter: Francis Bacon's Early Work in Furniture and Rugs
Before the screaming popes and dissolved figures, Francis Bacon was designing furniture and rugs in London. The work is geometric, assured, and almost overlooked.
London, 1930. At a studio and showroom in South Kensington, a 20-year-old Francis Bacon is selling furniture of his own design. Tubular steel chairs with cowhide seats. Circular mirrors mounted on low dressing tables. Glass-topped side tables. And on the floor, a geometric rug — signed, in the lower corner, Francis Bacon.
The photograph of this interior, published in The Studio magazine in August 1930 in an article titled 'The 1930 Look in British Decoration', is one of the more arresting images in the history of British design. Not because the room is exceptional by the standards of the period — it sits comfortably within the continental modernism that Bacon had absorbed during stays in Paris and Berlin — but because of who made it, and what came after.
The Rugs
Several rug designs survive in documented form from this period. All are geometric. All are signed. The compositions often show a clear awareness of Cubist spatial logic: overlapping planes, figure-ground ambiguity, a central tension between the geometric and the organic.
Looking at them now, with the benefit of knowing what Bacon would spend the next sixty years painting, the rug designs are almost uncanny in their foreshadowing. The colour relationships — the warm earth tones cut with hard black, the occasional acid note of yellow-green — appear again and again across the paintings. The spatial logic of overlapping planes becomes, in the canvases, the logic of flesh pressed against glass or figures dissolving into fields of colour.
The paintings are more extreme. But they are recognisably made by the same hand.
The Showroom
The studio photograph from 1930 shows the rug in its intended context: anchoring a room of modernist furniture, doing the same work Marion Dorn and Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann were doing in the hotels and pavilions of the same decade. The floor as the first decision. The rug as the surface from which a room's spatial logic is established.
Bacon closed the design practice around 1933 and turned fully to painting. He would later be characteristically dismissive of this early period — he destroyed a large portion of his early canvases and rarely discussed the furniture or textiles. But he kept the studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington from 1961 until his death in 1992, working in conditions of productive accumulation that the designer-self of 1930 would not have recognised.
The Palette That Remained
Perry Ogden photographed Reece Mews in 1998. The images show a room in which fifty years of looking had deposited itself: torn photographs, paint-encrusted surfaces, medical textbooks, colour references pinned and repinned. The floor itself is a record of every canvas that had rested on it.
What the photographs also show — though this is rarely the point made about them — is a colour environment. The oxblood floors, the chalky walls, the acid pinks and yellows of torn magazine pages. These are the colours of the paintings. They are also, in different registers, the colours of the rug designs made forty years earlier.
Bacon built one of the most distinctive colour systems in twentieth-century art. It was already present, in outline, in the work he made before he became a painter.
Scott's Shop is a design studio that produces limited-edition rugs.