John Edwards

Companion and heir of Francis Bacon

John Edwards, barman: born London 10 September 1949; died Bangkok 5 March 2003.

John Edwards was the painter Francis Bacon's last "protracted love", replacing "the fading image of George Dyer" as a blurred icon of East End authenticity in Bacon's work. His Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, painted in 1980 and 1984, showed Edwards "with his crossed and lifted leg seated on a stool, his dark quiff of hair, his sweeping jawline and his heavily handsome face", said the writer Andrew Sinclair: "Yet there was . . . a certain brooding stillness that bespoke a touch of respect and even fear in the painter."

Edwards's father was a London docker who lived in Cable Street. John, one of six children, was aged 22 and working for his two elder brothers in one of three East End pubs they owned when, in 1974, Muriel Belcher, the enchantingly foul-mouthed maîtresse of the Colony Room, brought Bacon to the Swan. Ian Board, Belcher's successor, said, "John was hypnotised."

Bacon was equally impressed. Although he said, "You don't want an old boiler like me", he seduced John Edwards, taking him gambling in casinos and cavorting in night-clubs. Bacon was by then Britain's most famous living artist, and a millionaire; Edwards was dyslexic and illiterate but, as one friend remarked cattily, "He learned to write his name quickly enough, as soon as he got a chequebook." Sinclair wrote, "As with Dyer, Bacon entered in his lengthy relationship with Edwards into the Pinteresque world of the play The Homecoming, where a refined menace pervades throughout."

Edwards recalled his "amazement" when he walked into Bacon's studio in Reece Mews and found a portrait of himself, although he had not by then sat for the artist. The studies of Edwards displayed a tenderness which militated against Bacon's aesthetic of violence and mortality. He was "depicting the man most close to him without wavering or exaggeration," according to Sinclair. "It was reality; it was the fact."

And it was Edwards's sense of reality which appealed to Bacon. "John told him exactly what he thought," recalled his brother David. "He was always ringing John up for advice on things." As for the Edwards family, they were pleased by the relationship. "Mum? Delighted!" said David Edwards. The Sohoite chronicler Dan Farson also approved: "Francis fussed over John with the beady eye of a mother hen, allowing nothing and no one to distract"; yet, "Because he was so fond of John, he was more irritable with other people, as if his possessiveness made him nervous."

When Bacon stayed with his cousin Pamela Firth at Cavendish Hall in Suffolk, the extended Edwards clan came too, buying property on the proceeds "of the sale of a Bacon painting or two". Replacing the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy of his descent, Bacon lived with his new "cockney family" in "a barricaded house . . . surrounded by gates and walls and signs of 'GUARD DOGS – WARNING'. Particularly assertive were a Rolls-Royce and Land Rover and a Bentley with the numberplate BOY 1."

At dinner Bacon's friends would find themselves seated next to convicted burglars. But some appreciated Edwards's charms. Stephen Spender told Bacon,

I think that, if I knew him well, I would become obsessed by him, and I can well understand loving him. Of course, it is seriously marvellous to be untainted by what is called education. It means he moves among real things, and not newspaper things.

"Steve was a lovely bloke," declared Edwards.

But even for Bacon the scene became too much, and he would escape to Europe and a new love, a Spanish banker. The influence of the Edwards family had made him grow away from friends such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Farson claims Edwards tried to reconcile Bacon and Freud in 1984, "but by then it was too late to matter". When Bacon died in Spain on 28 April 1992, Edwards inherited his estate, valued at £11,370,244.

On hearing of Bacon's death, Edwards – who lived in a nearby flat (bought by Bacon) with his own lover, an ex-convict named Philip Mordue – removed all the valuables from his friend's house for safe-keeping. He said

I am going to keep the house and studio exactly as it is. I am going to live in it until I die and then donate it to the nation. When I pop off, then it's up to them what they do with it.

In fact, he donated the studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it was painstakingly reconstructed; and entered a dispute with Marlborough Fine Art in London over Bacon's paintings.

Dan Farson criticised friends such as Bruce Bernard for not giving Edwards credit "as model for some of Francis's finest paintings in this final stage – quite apart from his value as a friend". Edwards spent his legacy on pink champagne in a Thai resort, surrounded by Bacon reproductions that mystified the locals. It is reported that what is left of Bacon's estate will go to Philip Mordue.

Philip Hoare