HENRY BACON

Known for both his accurately painted genre scenes and his watercolor renderings of views of Normandy and Egypt, Henry Bacon was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1839.  He served in the Union Army during the Civil War, was badly wounded, and discharged so that he and his wife were able to travel to Paris in 1864.  That October the two stayed in Brittany.  Robert Wylie spotted the couple two years later in a restaurant and described Bacon as “a handsome fellow of about our age of twenty with long, dark hair and a generally artistic aspect.”  Bacon must have been well versed in the French language, history and culture, for he was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; one of his teachers there was Alexandre Cabanel.  Moreover, he rubbed shoulders with Thomas Eakins in Gérôme’s atelier.  At that time, Bacon earned money by writing “penny-a-liners” for Boston newspapers.  In 1866 he was in Ecouen, studying with Edouard Frère.  Bacon exhibited no fewer than thirty-one paintings at the Paris Salon between 1867 and 1896.  These include genre works, historical scenes and shipboard subjects.  One example of the latter is an accident at sea: Steamer Taking a Pilot from 1885 (location unknown). Bacon also exhibited at the National Academy of Design (1872-83). The Quilting Party (Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr.), which Bacon shipped from Paris, was part of the NAD’s 1872 show.

One popular work in the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 was Bacon’s Boston Boys and General Gage, 1775 (Dimock Gallery, George Washington University), in which American children protest the encroachment of British soldiers upon their sledding areas.  Dwyer and Miller (1995) explain that “the children’s plight [was] a metaphor for the larger struggle of the colonists.”  In 1878 Bacon’s Land! Land! (perhaps the picture in the collection of John I. H. Baur) was on view at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.  When the French impressionists came upon the scene, Bacon assumed they were “afflicted with some hitherto unknown disease of the eye; for they neither see form nor color as other painters have given them to us, or as nature appears to all who do not belong to this association.”  Such a sober, meticulously accurate painter as Bacon could not understand “green or violet flesh,” purple trees and blue lawns.  Starting in 1895 Bacon limited his activity to the watercolor medium and he began to visit exotic locales, such as Egypt, Ceylon and Greece.  An example of this genre is Bacon’s A Street in Cairo (1905; Worcester Art Museum). Around 1900 the Bacons moved to London.  Mrs. Bacon published Our Houseboat on the Nile in 1902 and her husband died in Cairo in 1912.
   
Sources:
Bacon, [Laurie] Lee Bacon. Our Houseboat on the Nile. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1902; Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Art. Catalogue of a Memorial Exhibition of Water Colors by Henry Bacon. Washington, DC, 1931; Williams, Hermann Warner. Mirror to the American Past: A Survey of American Genre Painting: 1750-1900. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973, pp. 210-212; Hoopes, Donelson F. and Nancy Wall Moure. American Narrative Painting. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum, in association with Praeger Publishers, 1974, pp. 154-155; American Genre Painting in the Victorian Era: Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson and Their Contemporaries. New York: Hirschl and Adler, 1978, cat. no. 2.; Junkin, Sarah Caldwell. “The Europeanization of Henry Bacon (1839-1912),” Diss., Boston University, 1986; American Traditions in Watercolor. The Worcester Art Museum Collections. Ed. Susan E. Strickler. New York: Abbeville, Press, 1987, pp. 118-125; Zellman, Michael David. 300 Years of American Art. Secaucus, NJ: Wellfleet Press, 1987, p. 301; Holzer, Harold and Mark E. Neely, Jr. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art. New York: Orion Books, 1993, pp. 262-264, 294-295; Ackerman, Gerald. Les orientalistes de l’école américaine. Paris: ACR Edition Internationale, 1994, pp. 14-15; Dwyer, Margaret Swallow and Lenore D. Miller. “Henry Bacon: Victorian Sentiment and American History Painting.” American Art Review 7 (1995): 82-85.

Submitted by Michael Preston Worley, Ph.D.