The artist’s friend Barry Joule says it was his physique that helped inspire a 1980s series of cricket nudes

They were some of the most arresting images Francis Bacon created: a series of paintings mainly featuring a male torso and legs, naked except for sports shoes and cricket pads.

The model for the “cricket” paintings, which first went on display in the 1980s, has never been identified. Now, one of the artist’s friends claims he was the man on whom the images they were based.

Barry Joule says he has decided to come forward because one of the works from the series was in a major new Bacon exhibition in Paris and attitudes had changed since the 1980s, when the explicit images were deemed shocking by many.

Joule recalls: “I didn’t want everyone – my Canadian protestant family included – staring at and talking about my private parts. It might seem fairly ridiculous now, but not back then.”

When he saw the original composition, he says he was upset that he was recognisable: “Francis, annoyed at me complaining of a fairly good likeness of myself naked in the cricket portrait, at the last minute chopped off – ie, painted out – my head … casually yet sarcastically informing a stunned me the next day: ‘There, now I think you look much better this way – just the essentials here … and absolutely no head to worry about. I hope you are happy now.’ So, somewhat dejected, I found myself headless.”

Bacon created a series of seven paintings, one of which is on display in a Bacon exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Study of the Human Body, 1981-82 Photograph: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019

For Joule, the show has brought back memories of the day in 1982 when Bacon, he says, raised the idea of a cricket series, suggesting: “Perhaps you might be interested in being the model.”

Joule says he dismissed the idea, arguing that he had only ever watched one cricket game and “didn’t like it much, finding it very slow and as boring as watching paint dry”. Bacon, he says, replied: “Not my paint.”

The artist then revealed that inspiration for the composition had come to him the previous year when, on a warm summer’s day, he had watched from his window as Joule and two “muscular sporty Canadian chums stripped down to their shorts” were playing with a bat and ball in the cul-de-sac outside.

Joule says he was unaware that they had a spectator at the time. He recalls: “Francis said ‘the memory of your game … quite possibly gave birth to an idea [of a] cricket series’.”

Joule says that Bacon liked the cricket paintings so much that he stuck photographs of them on his kitchen wall. Bacon then photographed him in 1987: “I had wanted Francis to ‘proudly pose’ with these reproductions, but the modest painter said no, ‘much better you photograph me making a cup of tea’. So I did.”

Joule jokes that David Gower, the former England Test captain, had been suggested as the model, although he had never met Bacon.

Joule was described in Andrew Sinclair’s 1990s Bacon biography as one of “two very good-looking people” who had served as the model for the paintings, though he denied his involvement at the time. “I was prudishly not ready to come out of my ‘total nudity closet’. However, as these are a very important group of pictures, maybe now is the time to reveal all,” says Joule.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Francis Bacon suggested Joule take a picture of him making a cup of tea rather than posing. Photograph: Barry Joule

He recalls sitting for Bacon in his Reece Mews studio in London’s South Kensington: “I must admit to being slightly apprehensive that very hot July day in 1982 when Francis asked me to strip right down, then to put on gleaming white sports shoes and heavy cricket pads and finally climb up on a rather rickety wooden table.”

He says that the late John Edwards, then Bacon’s lover and companion, flew into a jealous rage when he realised that Joule had modelled for the artist. Joule claims Francis believed Edwards did not have the suitably athletic body for the series of cricket pictures. “Edwards discovered the nude photos of myself posing in the cricket gear,” says Joule. “Furious, he subsequently destroyed them.”

In 2004, Joule gave the Tate some 1,200 sketches from Bacon’s studio, then valued at £20m, one of the galleries’ most generous gifts. A small selection are on display at Tate Britain until the end of September.

The Pompidou show, Bacon: Books and Painting, runs until 20 January.