Francis Bacon's reputation grew spectacularly during the 1960s, with the impetus given by the Tate retrospective accelerating throughout the decade. Bacon maintained the capricious, contradictory attitude towards his success, though in diminishing degrees, for the rest of his life. He played with success very much as he gambled, dropping his bets at several roulette tables at once, exhilarated to be on a winning streak and pushing his luck again and again to see how far it would go. Bacon was obsessed by appearance, his own most of all, and he believed that homosexuals possessed an unusually keen eye for the way people looked. 'Homosexuals become more and more impossible with age,' he remarked, 'because they are obsessed with the physique. The 'gallery' Bacon created of a few London personalities is in itself an unusual phenomenon in mid-twentieth-century art, when the portrait was considered so retrograde that it all but disappeared apart from 'society' portraiture.