A little-known and yet central character in the life of Francis Bacon, the aptly named Jessie Lightfoot always protected him from his childhood bully father as well as from his worst excesses in London. The tenderness of this nanny from Cornwall contrasted with the violence that Bacon suffered very early on, and brings a new colour to the sulphurous palette of the painter.
Beyond the matchless humour and banter of this extraordinary woman confronted with the shady world of artists, Maylis Besserie also gives us a glimpse of Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century, both a powder keg and a splendid island
whose landscapes, scenery and animals haunted the famous painter’s canvases.
In the final of Maylis Besserie’s Irish-French trilogy, her preoccupation with the art and lives of artists who crossed borders between France and Ireland has a fitting climax as Bacon confronts the boundaries between the real and the imagined.
