Francis Bacon was once thrown through a plate-glass window by an enraged lover, damaging his face so badly that his right eye had to be sewn back into place, according to a biographer.

Art historian John Richardson also argues that Bacon's best work was inspired by sado-masochistic relationships - with his "goading" of one lover, George Dyer, eventually leading to the latter's death. The fatal end, in a hotel room lavatory, on the eve of a retrospective of the artist's paintings in Paris in 1971, was immortalised by Bacon in one of his most famous works.

Richardson, 85, who is completing the final volume of his biography of Picasso, uses an article in the forthcoming edition of the New York Review of Books to reveal secrets of Bacon's life - a man he knew since the Forties when the artist was in his early twenties.

Richardson recalls that Bacon, who died in 1992, revelled in a "most heinous assault" by an earlier lover, Peter Lacy.

He writes: "In a state of alcoholic dementia, he hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place. Bacon loved Lacy even more. For weeks he would not forgive Lucian Freud for remonstrating with his torturer. Mercifully, Lacy moved to Tangier."

In the article, Richardson said there was a direct link between Bacon's desires and his artistic output.

"Bacon would goad George [Dyer] into a state of psychic meltdown and then, in the early hours of the morning - his favourite time to work - he would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system."

Richardson recalled spending a drunken evening with the pair in New York in 1968, after which Dyer was found by Bacon unconscious on the hotel room floor, having washed down sleeping pills with a bottle of whisky. "The goading worsened, the imagery intensified," Richardson said of Bacon's subsequent work.

Bacon's studio in the Forties was a place of "ramshackle theatricality" where martinis were served in huge Waterford tumblers and a paint-stained garter belt was kicked under a sofa.

Bacon enlisted his blind nanny's help in his shoplifting exploits, when he would steal groceries, cosmetics and Kiwi boot polish for his hair.