Details of Sculptor

Surname

Bacon

Alternative Surname

First Name

John II

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1777

Flourished

Year of Death

1859

Biographical Details

Bacon inherited one of the most celebrated sculpture businesses in London and was responsible for numerous commissions during his relatively brief active career. He was born at 17 Newman Street on 13 March 1777, the second son of John Bacon RA and Elizabeth, née Wade. He trained in his father’s workshop and at the Royal Academy Schools, which he entered on 29 March 1790. In 1815 an article in the European Magazine claimed that he had been given a central role in his father’s workshop at a young age, executing figures for monuments from the age of eleven (Euro Mag, vol 67, Jan-June 1815, 3). A family friend, Richard Cecil, reported that John and his brother, Thomas Bacon, modelled and finished almost every major work produced by the studio after 1792 (GM 1799, vol 69, pt 2, 810). Given this early practical experience, it is not surprising that young Bacon turned out to be an exceptional RA student, winning a silver medal in 1793 for his ‘Model of an Academy figure’ (356) and a gold medal in 1794, awarded by unanimous vote for his relief of Adam contemplating Eve sleeping (354; Farington, vol 1, 268).
Bacon was responsible for the workshop when his father was away in the late 1790s and, although he was a younger son, his father left him the premises, stock and business at his death in August 1799. That year the young Bacon completed three of his father’s major commissions, statues of William Jones in St Paul’s Cathedral and William Mason in Westminster Abbey, and a relief for East India House. Over the next nine years Bacon worked on numerous other contracts won by his father and considered many of them to be his own work. He signed the monuments to Thomas Dundas and to the Captains Harvey and Hutt, and was at pains to inform the press that he was responsible for casting the bronze statue to William III in St James’s Square after his father’s death (Euro Mag, vol 54, July 1808, 37).
Bacon well understood his father’s business strategies and continued to run the workshop successfully, frequently adapting his father’s designs and motifs for new clients. The deathbed scene on Samuel Whitbread’s monument, begun by his father and completed by the younger Bacon, was re-utilised in barely modified form for the memorials to Thomas Starkey (68), Thomas Tyrwhitt Drake (158), Theodora de Fries (174) and Sir Egerton Leigh (244). Other motifs were also borrowed from his father’s repertory, such as the bowed female grieving over an urn or a sarcophagus (18, 56, 91), and the ‘pelican in its piety’ (17, 96, 132, 286). Like his father, Bacon adapted designs by Louis François Roubiliac, notably the deceased visited by Death in the form of a skeleton (55, 284), or emerging from the coffin at the Last Trump (137). Following a family tradition, he also made use of delightful naturalistic elements, such as a fire engine in relief on the monument to the founder of the Phoenix Fire Insurance Company (51), or an exterior elevation of St Mary de Castro, Leicester, on the monument to a vicar (185).
By 1802 Bacon was considered by many to be at the forefront of his profession. Sir Roger Newdigate, writing to Bacon about his wife's monument (36), flattered the sculptor by adding that the work ‘may be some little addition to the general reputation which your works have deservedly acquired’ (White 1995, 302-3). In January 1803 Bacon exhibited his statue of Charles, Marquess Cornwallis, before it was shipped to India (319). Farington claimed that 400-500 people visited it daily (Farington, vol 5, 1967). Despite the popular interest in his work the Royal Academy declined to elect Bacon an Associate in 1802. It became apparent to the sculptor that the Academicians regarded him merely as an adjunct to his father, with no claim to originality. Farington suggested that his work might be reassessed if he showed a bust of a famous academician at the next Academy exhibition, a suggestion Bacon appears not to have pursued (Farington vol 5, 1928). Further failed election attempts followed in 1803, 1804, 1806 and 1811, when Bacon failed to attract a single vote.
In 1806 Bacon competed with the overbearing J C F Rossi RA for the commission to execute a statue of Marquess Wellesley, Governor-General of India, for Kolkata (Calcutta) (321). Rossi considered it demeaning to compete with Bacon, and the architect Robert Smirke felt that Bacon’s model, exhibited together with Rossi’s at 15 Portland Place, London, ‘was in so bad a taste that were it to be executed & put up here it would disgrace the country’ (Farington, vol 7, 2704). Nevertheless, Bacon won the commission, with the support of Charles Long, later Lord Farnborough, and others. Bacon went on to execute a second statue of Wellesley and of Cornwallis for Bombay (322, 323). These prestigious commissions formed part of the workshop’s growing market for sculpture in the colonies. A large number of his monuments were shipped to India and the West Indies, most of them standard designs. Occasionally there were concessions to the work’s intended context such as ‘Indian’ figures (75, 322), elephants (142, 223, 322) and orientalised putti (162).
In 1808 Bacon passed the daily running of his workshop to Charles Manning, who had worked for his father. An extensive agreement, dated 24 June 1808, allowed Manning to buy one quarter of Bacon’s designs, marble and stock, valued at £1,068, and to manage the business full-time in Bacon’s name from 17 Newman Street. Bacon himself would ‘not be obliged to attend there further or otherwise than as he shall think fit and proper’ (Cox-Johnson 1959, 239). Three-quarters of the profits were to be returned to Bacon. The partnership continued until Manning’s death in 1812. Since Manning was a prize-winning Royal Academy student and a capable sculptor, many of the works signed ‘John Bacon’ in the years 1808-1812 may well have been Manning’s work, perhaps carved without Bacon’s supervision.
Bacon continued to compete successfully for major public commissions. In 1810 he won the commission for the monument in St Paul’s Cathedral to the hero of Corunna, Sir John Moore (204), after which Rossi declared that he was never again going to apply for any competition judged by the Committee of Taste (Farington vol 10, 3669). The innovative work, completed after Manning’s death, rates as one of the finest early nineteenth-century monuments in the cathedral. A muscular near-naked man and a winged angel lower the lifeless corpse of the hero into his simple sarcophagus, watched by a cherub holding the colours. The composition inverts the familiar conceit of the deceased rising from the tomb and so evokes pity not hope. Bacon later claimed that he had ignored all modifications to the design proposed by the Committee of Taste and, furthermore, that they had failed to notice. Antonio Canova praised the work on his visit to London in November 1816. Bacon, thrilled by the visit of the Italian sculptor, insisted on sketching his portrait.
Late in 1812 Bacon completed a statue of George III for the Bank of Ireland (324) and again exhibited the work for public scrutiny before it was shipped to its destination. He wrote to the Countess of Normanton in January 1813 that, although he had not been accorded a sitting, he had been flattered that it was a strong likeness. Farington, perhaps reflecting the antipathy of the Royal Academy, curtly refused to go to see the work (Farington vol 12, 4304).
In 1815 Bacon held an extensive exhibition of recently completed work and the European Magazine produced a flattering account of his career. The journal saluted his independence of patronage in favour of a ‘general appeal to the taste and opinion of his country’ (Euro Mag, vol 67, Jan-June 1815, 3). The article also alluded obliquely to the improper manner in which some of his rivals for public commissions had conducted themselves during competitions, and saluted Bacon for refusing to name his less-successful rivals as he had ‘too high a respect for the character and talents of many of the artists who did not chance to succeed against him’ (ibid, 4).
By 1818 Bacon had gone into business with his former partner’s son, Samuel Manning I. Manning moved into Newman Street in 1819. No details survive of their partnership agreement but the monument to Christopher Metcalfe, 1820 (259), with its familiar relief of a woman mourning over a sarcophagus, was signed ‘Bacon inv Manning fec’, which suggests that Manning was now in charge of carving works from Bacon’s designs. Bacon’s well-used vocabulary of motifs continued to be used by the workshop, though modifications appeared occasionally for subjects from a military background, such as a woman grieving over a cannon (169), or a soldier over a sarcophagus (196, 198). Bacon’s design for the monument to Roger Holland and family combined several of the well-tried motifs, including the weeping female, a broken column, a sarcophagus and wilting flowers, to which were added portrait medallions (296).
In 1823 Bacon left London with his wife Susannah and his large family of ten children and also moved out of his country house at Bromley in Kent. They went to live at Sidcliffe, near Sidmouth, and later to Winchester. In 1824 he exhibited at the Royal Academy for the last time. Bacon had always been comfortably off; he owned and developed 72 properties in London, had other business interests, and earned a steady income from the workshop. He continued to produce designs from his home in Sidcliffe, but virtually retired from active work, and in the 1830s the workshop ceased production. Samuel Manning remained at Newman Street until his death in 1836 and the premises were taken over for a short time by E H Baily RA.
In 1837 Bacon moved again, to Mount Radford, a suburb of Exeter, to be close to his daughter, Christina, who died in 1841. The diarist, Caroline Fox, recorded that Bacon ‘after having given up his craft for twenty-five years, resuming it at the request of his dying daughter to make her monument,...found himself as much at home with his tools as ever’ (Fox 1882, vol 2, 94-5). The monument is quite different from the rest of his oeuvre, depicting a recumbent effigy of his daughter, her hands clasped in prayer, within a gothic niche (312). The Ecclesiologist said of it that ‘it is not too much to say that few of the best ages of Christian art surpass it… the face (which is said to be a striking likeness) has all the sweetness and composure distinctive of Catholick times.’ (Ecclesiologist XIV, XV, Oct 1842, 58). It was probably also around this date that Bacon carved the altarpiece for St Lawrence, Exeter (351), which Beatrix Cresswell called ‘very remarkable, not to say remarkably ugly’ (Cresswell 1908, 76).
This brief return to his profession appears to have stirred Bacon to letters, and in 1843 he published two essays on sculpture. The first was a transcription of a speech he had given to the Exeter Diocesan Society, in which he expressed his despondency at the way in which modern monumental sculpture had disfigured English churches. For a man whose firm had produced over 300 monuments, this can only have been an expression of penitence. This was followed by A letter to the Rt Hon Sir Robert Peel, a reminiscence of Bacon’s dealings with the Committee of Taste, which had in his opinion imposed a unifying banality on most of the monuments in St Paul’s by its excessive interference. Bacon hoped that the current commission appointed to decorate the Houses of Parliament would avoid this error.
In the 1840s Bacon moved to lodgings at 5 Bath House, Worthing. By coincidence the residence was shared with Peter Cunningham, the son of the elder Bacon’s venomous biographer. Cunningham recalled meeting ‘a staid, demure, elderly gentleman’ (Builder 7 March 1863,, vol 21, 167), whose opinions he later used when revising his father’s account of Bacon’s father. In 1847 Bacon began his own Reminiscences of the late John Bacon Esquire RA and other persons of his time... (1847-50), in which he recalled a father he clearly held in great regard, but found irritable and severe. This is an important source for the life and character of both father and son.
Bacon subsequently moved with his daughter Elizabeth to Bathwick Hill, near Bath, where he died on 14 July 1859. In his will he left £13,000, numerous properties, a large art collection, and models and drawings, both by himself and his father. His death notice in The Gentleman’s Magazine did not record his profession, but merely that he was ‘son of the late John Bacon, R.A., sculptor’ (GM, Sept 1859, 202, 314).
Bacon’s family background was both a blessing and a hindrance. Although his early training rendered him a highly skilled and able sculptor and works such as the Moore and Medley monuments show him to have been capable of exceptional work, his reliance on his father’s designs gave the impression that he could not establish a separate identity as a sculptor. His large inheritance allowed him to withdraw from the profession when he became disillusioned by a lack of artistic recognition, and his decision to do so appears to have given him a severe sense of failure, which he recorded in sorry detail in his diaries.
During his lifetime Bacon received public acclaim, the support of many connoisseurs, and had an inexhaustible stream of customers. Nevertheless his fellow sculptors, Rossi, John Flaxman RA and Nathaniel Marchant all held a low opinion of his work (Farington, passim). A century and a half later Rupert Gunnis showed a similar dismissive attitude: he considered Bacon inferior to his father as a sculptor and his monumental workshop productions to be a lamentable blot on the ecclesiastical landscape. The discovery of numerous family documents by Ann Saunders (née Cox-Johnson) in the 1950s has, however, helped to flesh out a career which is more interesting than most of the works it produced. As an illustration of early 19th-century workshop practice, as a vignette of the personal and aesthetic politics of the Royal Academy and as a case study of a privileged and sensitive child failing to cope with his paternal inheritance, John Bacon’s story is surely worthy of more attention.
MGS
Literary References: Farington, passim; Bacon II 1843 (1), 117-26; Bacon II 1843 (2); Cox-Johnson 1959, 236-242; Cox-Johnson 1961; Gunnis 1968, 28-31; Whinney 1988, 313, 324, 370, 371, 442 n8; Yarrington 1988, 67, 119; White 1995, 302-3; Groseclose 1995, passim; Clifford 1995, 15-16
Archival References: Bacon/Normanton; Bacon/Hoare; Bacon/Anon; Bacon/MC Wyatt; Bacon family archives, including diaries running from August 1815-October 1824; Bacon reminiscences 1847-50; Bacon property papers (used extensively in Cox-Johnson 1959, 236-242, and Cox-Johnson 1961); IGI; Ann Saunders typescript (coll the author).
Wills: John Bacon RA, PROB 11/1328, p171; John Bacon II (details Ann Saunders MS).
Collections of Drawings: VAM, designs for unidentified monuments, 8818-1-120; two designs for an unidentified monument, marked ‘Sidcliff’, watercolour, E.1566-7-1931; design for unidentified monument, after 1828, E.1568-1931; 11 designs for unidentified monuments on 11 sheets, E.1571-1581-1931; designs for unidentified church monuments 8520-9, 8417-2, 8417-4, 8516-2; signed pencil drawings of ‘Mr E. Thornton, E.393-1943, and E.400-1943, ‘Mrs Blair’ E.401-1943, ‘Mr Blair’ E.402-1943, and ‘Patty Bacon’ 1793, E.406-1943
Miscellaneous Drawings: portrait of Antonio Canova, pencil, 1815, private coll (Clifford 1995, 14, repr)
Portraits of the Sculptor: John Bacon RA, pencil portrait as a boy, VAM E.410-1943; T Blood engr, portrait of Bacon, after an original canvas by John Russell RA for Euro Mag, Jan 1815 (Cox-Johnson 1959, repr 40); self-portrait, bust (347); Charles Manning, bust, exhibited RA 1812, untraced