Collected over 20 years and up until now mostly unseen, I am delighted to reveal this small but precious and very personal collection, some of which were sourced from the floor of Francis Bacon's Reece Mews studio in London's South Kensington. These constituent parts help illustrate some of the rituals to Bacon's prolific and deeply referenced practice and, moreover, his informed and unusual appreciation of the photograph as his preferred source material, and importantly, once part of the now famous intricate and beautiful chaos that was Bacon's working environment.

His reference points emanated from wonderfully oblique sources-such as stills from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, KC Clark's authoritative book Positioning in Radiography and Peter Beard's vivid obsession with the fragility of nature as seen through his lens of nature's cycle of life and death. These and so many more were used as important reference in Bacon's paintings.

Bacon was drawn to the photograph by way as a powerful reference rather than painting from life. These disparate photographs played an important role in his quest for inspiration, from the lesser known but quite brilliant photographer John Deakin to Eadweard Muybridge, whose motion studies were a favourite. Bacon instinctively recognised Deakin's extraordinary portraits as superb visceral and perceptive images which allowed him to draw out the essence of his chosen subjects. Other photographs found include enlarged contact sheets of two wrestling anonymous men, some complete with Bacon's own hand-drawn directional markings and clearly referenced in his brilliant and complex paintings. Similar contacts can be seen today at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin where Bacon's complete studio was forensically moved in 1998.

Added to these are rare vintage cibachrome photographs by Bruce Bernard, one of Bacon's closest Soho friends and legendary picture editor under Harry Evans at the Sunday Times during its glory years. Bernard, who photographed Bacon many times, did so in a way that only someone who knew him well could have done so eloquently. Also included are works by Jacques Saraben and Michel Giniès and of course anonymous. Many of these works were not only found but also taken inside Bacon's deeply personal space.

This cornucopia of varied images, once part of the fascinating and private world that Francis Bacon subconsciously surrounded himself with, are now here to be studied and experienced as standalone objects.

Michael Hoppen

The importance of such material has become increasingly apparent since the extraordinary archaeological reconstruction of Bacon's Reece Mews studio at The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.

This small exhibition offers a different, more intimate encounter with that same world. Rather than presenting photographs simply as documentary evidence of Bacon's life, it proposes that they should be looked at as objects and images in their own right-charged remnants of the visual environment from which some of the most powerful paintings of the twentieth century emerged.

For the first time, these privately held extremely rare photographs and studio survivals allow the public to enter the extraordinary image-world that surrounded Francis Bacon: a world in which the accidental, the intimate, the scientific, the erotic and the everyday could coexist, collide and ultimately become painting.