Bacon moved to London in 1925. He later worked there as an interior architect and furniture designer. From 1930 onwards he began painting as a self-taught artist. He oriented himself towards the trends of Surrealism and Cubism and created his first oil paintings. But he was not particularly satisfied with the results and gave up painting for the time being. In 1942 he destroyed most of his works. It was not until 1944 that he returned to painting. Bacon decided to make a living as a full-time artist. The first success came in 1945 with the work "Three Studies of Figures from a Crucifixion", which can now be viewed in the Tate Gallery in London. The artist depicted his themes such as human isolation and conflict in images, such as the painting "Pope Innocent X." from 1953. The work is now in the William Burden Collection in New York. In it, violence and pain characterize the deformation of his painting figures.

Bacon was inspired to create this work by the Spanish painter Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Vélazquez, one of Spain's most important portraitists. The British painter used the portrait of the Pope entitled "Innocent X," which was created in 1650, as the occasion for his own visionary painting. Bacon was based on surrealism and, alongside Graham Sutherland, became one of the most important representatives of visionary painting. A pessimistic mood can be found in his pictures, which not only reflects the deepest fears and hopelessness, but also sees life itself as hopelessness. The eerie picture figures radiate distortion and mutilation, they communicate human fragility and cruelty - as in the "Crucifixion Triptych" from 1965, for example. Bacon often found the motivation for his pictures from slaughterhouses, press photos or medical books .

The painter was also inspired by artists such as the early Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (Jeronimus van Aecken), the English poet, painter and graphic artist William Blake, the Swiss-English painter and draftsman Johann Heinrich Füßli and the Dutch painter Vincent Willem van Gogh. In 1957, Bacon made a variation of van Gogh's work entitled "Vincent Goes to Work." Bacon's portraits are thematically located between violence and despair as well as aggression and pain. The work entitled "Two Studies for a Portrait of Georg Dyer", created in 1968, provides an impressive example of the tension of its subject. The characters reflect individuals exposed to deformative social forces. In this way, Bacon classified himself as a realist documenter. His expressionistic, visionary style of painting seemed shocking. With his visionary pictures, Bacon had a significant influence on contemporary painting in England and Europe.

The first Bacon retrospective took place in London in 1955. The painter experienced further retrospectives of his work during his lifetime. In 1962 a retrospective took place at the Tate Gallery in London. Two further retrospective events followed in the Guggenheim Museum in 1963 and 1964. Another one was organized at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1985.

Francis Bacon died on April 28, 1992 in Madrid.