Prologue: Tesseract 

Some things that are known about Jessie Lightfoot are almost certainly true: that she was born in 1871 in the West Country; that she moved to Ireland to look after the children of Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon; that she spent her last twenty years in London, most of them living with Captain Bacon’s prodigal and prolific son; and that she died there, aged eighty, her biography a latent legend. 

The very few other things known about Jessie (aka Nanny, aka Nan) Lightfoot are known only in the sense that they have been read or heard and, inevitably, repeated. These things are not so much false or apocryphal as they are, simply, irresistible. 

So it is that in any account of the life and work of Francis Bacon (and in many a memoir of his  devotees), Nan Lightfoot makes a handful of famously eccentric appearances: as financial advisor – pimp, bookie and shoplifter – to the cash-strapped young artist; as the female in the domestic triangle that included Bacon’s longest and most pacific domestic partner; and finally, inexplicably, as the blind old woman who used the kitchen table of 7 Cromwell Place as her bed and accompanied a louche middle-aged artist’s debauches with her knitting needles. In sources with only one reference to Lightfoot, Jessie you will likely read that Bacon was ‘devastated’ by her death. That’s always the word: ‘devastated.’ Just as the dead woman herself is forever: ‘eccentric.’ As if ‘devastated’ were definitive and ‘eccentric’ enough said.  

Jessie Lightfoot was - by all accounts that bother to mention her - the rock, the pillar, the mother figure to whom Francis Bacon was devoted. But that’s, really, all we know. 

Francis Bacon painted many of his friends. The women he most loved were also artistic muses. There are hundreds of sketches - studies from, studies for, studies after and studies of females who owe something to Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, and Isabelle Rawthorne.[i] But there are no portraits of Jessie Lightfoot. There is far more documentary evidence of Bacon’s lovers, drinking-partners and gallery agents than there is of this mother-figure who at least one biographer supposed, might have been his biological mother as well. And yet even this ‘expert’ did not deign to find any further evidence of Lightfoot’s other possible legacies. 

I am curious about this lack of curiosity. I am not averse to research, but I am also not averse to working the same small ball of clay that so many have left unworked. Nanny Lightfoot, they agree, is rich material. So, I have chosen to work it. 

Much has been written about Francis Bacon’s artistic influences. His notorious studio left material enough for a host of archivists and scholars to do so. Among the chaotic detritus of his source material were dozens of folded, torn, painted reproductions of the 19th century contact plates of Edward Muybridge’s pioneering movement series. Muybridge’s work, capturing the anatomical mechanics of speed and calisthenic, was key to Bacon’s untrained portraiture. But it is the landscape work that Muybridge photographed prior to his experiments in motion photography that perhaps best reflect Bacon’s relationship to his Nanny. 

And so I end this preface with a quote not from a Bacon critic, but from a Muybridge critic, the filmmaker Hollis Frampton, about the photographer’s series of images of waterfalls in Yosemite: “(his) long exposures … produce images of a strange ghostly substance that is in fact the tesseract of water: what is to be seen is not water itself, but the virtual volume it occupies during the whole time-interval of the exposure.” 

I have tried to do what Muybridge did with photographic plate and what Francis Bacon claimed to do in paint: to create the impression that a human being has passed across the page, or that water has passed before a long lens. Jessie Lightfoot is a tesseract – a constant present, blurred. I am just a curious fisher in those unexposed rapids.