Overheard: Painter Francis Bacon’s childhood home on the market in Dublin for €1.6m

The war of words rages over the future of the Joyce-linked The Dead house on Usher’s Quay, but another remarkable Dublin dwelling is under the hammer unnoticed.

Number 63 Baggot Street, in the heart of the city’s Georgian core, was the childhood home of the painter Francis Bacon. Over four storeys, a basement and a “turnkey” mews at the back, it’s 395sq m and comes with a weight-loss-oriented personal training business as a tenant.

There is a plaque up in the painter’s honour at the house where he was born in 1909 to Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon of the British army and Sheffield steel heiress Christina Winifred Frith. They had many addresses over the years, from Straffan, Co Kildare, and Abbeyleix, Co Laois, to South Kensington in London, as Eddy Bacon pursued horse training. The troublesome Francis was eventually whipped off to boarding school, London and international fame.

But it all started in Dublin, where Bacon’s studio is recreated in the Hugh Lane gallery but his international renown is not traded upon to anything like the degree of the capital’s writers.