“Who’s number one?” John Berryman asked in 1963 when Robert Frost died. “Who’s number one? Cal [Robert Lowell] is number one, isn’t he?” Francis Bacon was number one among British painters when he died in 1992. Next came Lucian Freud, who died in 2011. And now Frank Auerbach is number one, isn’t he? The opening in October of a seven-room Auerbach retrospective at Tate Britain confirms his primacy.1

Bacon seems to have recognized his heirs long ago. In 1963, John Deakin photographed the incipient School of London in Wheeler’s Restaurant in Soho. Two tables are pushed together, the sitters arranged as if unable to do anything but evoke a Last Supper, or at least a Feast in the House of Levi. Bacon sits in the martyr’s seat, before the sacramental ice bucket and champagne. Freud sits on Bacon’s right, Auerbach on Bacon’s left, and the minor apostles Timothy Behrens and Michael Andrews at the ends. In one photograph, Freud has Bacon’s attention, and Auerbach talks with Andrews; later, the diners autographed a print of this shot. In another photograph, Auerbach lights Bacon’s cigarette; Bacon turns towards Auerbach’s light, and Freud, one hand folded on the other, looks suddenly alone. A year later, in 1964, Bacon painted his Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. The two contenders, wearing white t-shirts and not much else, lounge on red thrones or mattresses in one of Bacon’s bare, cell-like spaces. The diptych describes a triangular intimacy,