1777 - 1859

Sculptor. Born in London, second son of the sculptor John Bacon RA. He trained under his father and at the Royal Academy, which he entered in 1789. His first exhibit at the Royal Academy was a relief of Moses Striking the Rock, shown in 1792. On his father’s death in 1799, he took over his business and completed unfinished commissions, such as the pediment for East India House in the City of London, and the three-figure memorial to Marquess Cornwallis for Calcutta. Another commission in which the younger Bacon worked to his father’s design was the bronze equestrian figure of William III (1808), for St James’s Square, London. He went on to create three statues of his own for India: two of the Marquess Wellesley _for Calcutta and Bombay (1809), and one of Cornwallis for Bombay (1810). He continued and even expanded his father’s trade in funerary monuments. Many of his monuments, particularly after the establishment of a partnership with his pupil, Samuel Manning, are routine performances. However, he did, on occasion, produce church monuments of great poignancy. Perhaps his most outstanding work is the monument to Sir John Moore in St Paul’s Cathedral (1810--15), which shows the general being lowered into his tomb by a nude warrior and a female Victory. Bacon’s commercial success was resented by fellow artists, and he was not even elected to Associateship of the Royal Academy. One of his last works, the monument to his daughter, Mrs Medley (1842), in St Thomas’s Church, Exeter, is already in an entirely Victorian taste, a recumbent effigy with hands clasped in prayer under a Gothic canopy. Sources: Roscoe (2009); N. Penny (1977); M. Whinney (1988).