Francis liked the colour of blood; this was his own justification for his morbid subject matter. ‘You’ve only got to go into a butcher’s shop like Harrods Food Hall,’ he said.
It was typically Baconian that he saw it in the context of Harrods.

He continued: ‘It’s nothing to do with mortality but it’s to do with the great beauty of the colour of the meat.’ Rembrandt and Soutine shared his attraction to the raw flesh of hanging carcasses.

Daniel Farson – The Gilded Gutter Life Of Francis Bacon. p 129