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Peggy Bacon
1895–1987
BirthplaceRidgefield, Connecticut, United States of America
Death placeKennebunk, Maine, United States of America
BiographyPeggy Bacon achieved success as a creator of satirical drawings, prints, and illustrated books from the 1920s through the 1950s. The daughter of artists, she was born Margaret Frances Bacon in Litchfield, Connecticut, traveled widely with her parents, and attended a private boarding school in New Jersey. Bacon displayed artistic talent as a young child, and in lieu of attending college she enrolled at the School of Applied Arts for Women in New York City in 1913. The following year she began studies with landscape painter Jonas Lie (1880–1940), who organized her first show in his studio. From 1915 to 1920 Bacon studied life drawing, portraiture, and painting at New York's Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller, George Bellows, and John Sloan, among others, and she also spent two summers with the avant-garde art community in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she worked with pioneering modernists Andrew Dasburg (1887–1979) and B. J. O. Nordfeldt (1878–1955). In 1917, Bacon taught herself to make prints in the medium of drypoint etching, which remained her favorite graphic technique.
In 1919 Bacon began combining her drawings and prints with prose and poetry. As her prints appeared in exhibitions and in publications, she wrote and illustrated works of satire and humorous children's books. Her 1934 book Off With Their Heads established Bacon as one of America's leading caricaturists, and her drawings were much in demand for such prominent periodicals as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, as well as the leftist journals New Masses and The New Republic. Bacon also received early recognition of her work as a fine artist, with important solo exhibitions at several galleries including the Intimate Gallery run by modernist impresario Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946).
In 1920, Bacon married painter Alexander Brook (1898–1980) and traveled with him to Paris and London. The couple formed part of the New York social realist group of artists later dubbed the Fourteenth Street school and, with their two children, summered in the artists' communities of Woodstock and Croton, New York. Following her divorce from Brook in 1940, Bacon often worked in Maine. She was active as a teacher at the Art Students League and at art schools and private secondary academies in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., New York, and New Jersey. Bacon gradually abandoned her satirical approach and focused instead on images of everyday small-town life. In the mid-1950s, with her eyesight failing, she returned to painting and began to create lyrical, even dreamlike landscapes with elements of fantasy. Bacon moved to Maine in 1961 and continued to paint, with the aid of a magnifying glass, into her last years. She remains best known as a witty caricaturist whose images record New York's lively art world of the middle decades of the twentieth century.
In 1919 Bacon began combining her drawings and prints with prose and poetry. As her prints appeared in exhibitions and in publications, she wrote and illustrated works of satire and humorous children's books. Her 1934 book Off With Their Heads established Bacon as one of America's leading caricaturists, and her drawings were much in demand for such prominent periodicals as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, as well as the leftist journals New Masses and The New Republic. Bacon also received early recognition of her work as a fine artist, with important solo exhibitions at several galleries including the Intimate Gallery run by modernist impresario Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946).
In 1920, Bacon married painter Alexander Brook (1898–1980) and traveled with him to Paris and London. The couple formed part of the New York social realist group of artists later dubbed the Fourteenth Street school and, with their two children, summered in the artists' communities of Woodstock and Croton, New York. Following her divorce from Brook in 1940, Bacon often worked in Maine. She was active as a teacher at the Art Students League and at art schools and private secondary academies in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., New York, and New Jersey. Bacon gradually abandoned her satirical approach and focused instead on images of everyday small-town life. In the mid-1950s, with her eyesight failing, she returned to painting and began to create lyrical, even dreamlike landscapes with elements of fantasy. Bacon moved to Maine in 1961 and continued to paint, with the aid of a magnifying glass, into her last years. She remains best known as a witty caricaturist whose images record New York's lively art world of the middle decades of the twentieth century.