The artist, his muse and his muse's lover (not to mention an pounds

WITH a suicide, some petty criminals, a brilliant artist, his homosexual lover and a mysterious shooting, the only element missing seems to be murder. It is the story of the legacy of Francis Bacon and it all begins with a death.

Not the 1992 death of Bacon, the brilliant artist in question - the Soho bohemian, irascible charmer and ill-tempered drunk, a sadomasochistic homosexual who could move from gentleman to boor in the downing of glass.

And not even the death of his long-time friend and sole beneficiary of his pounds 11 million will, John Edwards, who died of lung-cancer in a Thai hospital this week and opened a whole new mystery into the ownership of Bacon's paintings and the worth of his estate.

The death that starts this whole tale is the suicide of Bacon's lover George Dyer, sitting on a lavatory bowl with blood coming out of his nose and mouth, having swallowed fistfuls of sleeping pills in a Paris hotel room in 1971.

Dyer was a small-time criminal when he met Bacon, and the artist delighted in telling the story of their first meeting. As he told it, Dyer was at work, burglarising Bacon's studio, which then was on Narrow Street in the East End.

But he hadn't realised the artist was in residence and asleep.

Bacon said that he woke up, saw the burglar and immediately said: "Take all your clothes off and get into bed with me. Then you can have all you want."

Less imaginatively, and perhaps with a greater degree of truth, Bacon also said they met when he was drinking in a Soho pub with the photographer John Deakin and Dyer came over, saying: "You all seem to be having a good time.

Can I buy you a drink?"

Either way they ended up as lovers. That was in 1964. Dyer had been in jail, in Pentonville as well as Borstal, but Bacon was unconcerned. He said that "I think in a way he was simply too nice to be a crook. Anyway he was always being caught".

Dyer was more complicated than just nice. He was a drifter with a speech impediment, he was withdrawn and often sullen. Terribly unsure of himself before he actually killed himself, he had attempted suicide at least twice before.

He was also the subject of some of Bacon's greatest work. Bacon could not get enough of Dyer onto canvas.

In 1968, for example, three of his works were Portrait Of George Dyer In A Mirror, Two Studies Of George Dyer With A Dog and Two Studies For A Portrait Of George Dyer.

Earlier works included George Dyer Crouching and George Dyer Talking. After his death there was the triptych In Memory Of George Dyer, and Triptych August 1972.

But the relationship between mas-

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