Genuinely overcome, he wrote those words, which are now indelibly marked in the Irish national psyche. Was the exhibition title then an attempt to finally induct Bacon into an Irish canon?
     According to Dawson, the idea wasn’t to canonize him, but to infer an Irish sensibility. This for Dawson can be summed up in Bacon’s outsider-ness. Bacon’s family were not Anglo-Irish like some of their acquaintances. His parents were English while he was Irish. Yet his type of Irishness was not something that could give him access to the rebellious spirit of the War of Independence. In a family where hunting, shooting, and fishing were de rigueur, the sensitive homosexual artist was bound to transgress etiquette and sensibility. Chronic asthma also played a role in distancing Bacon from normal life. It seems he was destined for all sorts of exclusion.
      And yet that may be the very thing that confers Irishness upon him; a compulsion to true self-determination, not of the national, but of the individual sort. Bacon rejected parochial narrow-mindedness and had to escape it. In this sense he is firmly among the ranks of those other Irish greats, Joyce and Beckett, whose own Irishness is exemplified by an exile where their identities come to full fruition.

Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty invites us to witness an outsider who turns the human inside out. What insight it offers for its audience is unique, and it goes to new lengths to contextualize one of the greatest artists of the last century.