Bacon, Peggy, 1895-1987

Peggy Bacon (1895-1987) was a printmaker from Cape Porpoise, Me.

Margaret Frances (Peggy) Bacon lived from 1895 to 1987. She was a teacher, artist, illustrator and author known for her humorous satires. She wrote and illustrated many books for children, among them Mercy and the Mouse, Off with Their Heads, and The Ghost of Opalina. She also illustrated many children's books, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Treasury of Cat Stories. She contributed artwork to magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Biographical Source: Something About the Author, vol. 50 p. 42

The vertical files of the Whitney Library originated with the Museum's founding in 1930 and include research materials on 20th century American art. Central to the collection are the files of the American Art Research Council, an agency administered by the Whitney Museum between 1942 and 1948, in cooperation with thirty museums and university art departments, to document and authenticate American art. The library now serves as a repository for the AARC records. The Council compiled records of the works of leading American artists, including information as to medium, size, signature, date, history, owners, exhibitions, reproductions and auction sales.

Peggy Bacon (1895-1987) was a printmaker, painter, caricaturist, illustrator, poet, and writer (of childrens' books) from Cape Porpoise, Me.

Peggy Bacon was born Margaret Frances Bacon on May 2, 1895. She grew up in Ridgefield, Conn. and studied at the Art Students' League. Bacon was married to painter Alexander Brook. She died January 3, 1987.

Peggy Bacon was born in 1895 in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and grew up an only child after the death of two younger brothers in infancy. Her parents, Charles Roswell Bacon and Elizabeth Chase Bacon, had met at the Art Students League, where her father had studied with Robert Henri. Her father pursued a career in painting and writing until his suicide in 1913, and her mother painted miniatures.

A child of artists, Bacon began to draw at a very early age, and by age ten she was already earning money for her illustrations, drawings of literary characters made for dinner place cards. She did not attend school until 1909, when her parents sent her to a boarding school in Summit, New Jersey. She began her formal art training shortly after her father's death, enrolling in the School of Applied Arts for Women at the end of 1913. In the summer of 1914, she attended Jonas Lie's landscape class in Port Jefferson, Long Island, and continued private studies with him in New York City. Lie gave Bacon her first solo exhibition in 1915. From 1915 until 1920, she studied at the Art Students League under John Sloan, Kenneth Hayes Miller, George Bellows, Mahroni Young, and others. In the summers, she took classes first in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then in Woodstock, New York, where she studied with Andrew Dasburg.

Bacon's circle was formed at the Art Students League, and the League's summer school in Woodstock. She met her husband, Alexander Brook, in Woodstock, and they were married in 1920. Both were active in the Woodstock Artists Association. Other artists in their close-knit group included Dorothea Schwarz (Greenbaum), Anne Rector (Duffy), Betty Burroughs (Woodhouse), Katherine Schmidt (Kuniyoshi Shubert), Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Molly Luce, Dorothy Varian, Edmund Duffy, Dick Dyer, David Morrison, and Andrew Dasburg. Many from this group were involved in the short-lived satirical magazine at the League called Bad News, published in 1918 with several of Bacon's earliest satirical drawings. Her first book, The True Philosopher and Other Cat Tales, was published in 1919. Brook and Bacon traveled to England in 1920, where their daughter Belinda was born. A son, Sandy, was born in Woodstock in 1922. In the early 1920s, Brook worked with Juliana Force at the Whitney Studio Club, and they were involved in the cultural life that sprang up around the gallery, which featured up-and-coming artists. For many years, Bacon and her family split their time between New York and Woodstock, and later summered in Cross River, NY. After divorcing Brook in 1940, Bacon spent summers in Ogunquit, Maine.

Though she initially thought of herself as a painter, she built her reputation on her drawings and prints, which often satirized the people around her in their natural habitats - artists in life classes, at dances, and in social situations, or a throng of people in a museum, on a city sidewalk, or a ship's deck. She became sought after for her illustrations and witty, topical verse in magazines such as Dial, Delineator, The New Yorker, New Republic, Fortune, and Vanity Fair . She helped to establish the American Print Makers, an artists' organization based in the Downtown Gallery which sought greater exhibition opportunities for printmakers. Bacon illustrated over sixty books, nineteen of which she also wrote, between 1919 and 1966, including many children's books and a successful mystery novel called The Inward Eye (1952). In 1933 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and used it to complete a collection of caricatures of art world figures called Off With Their Heads (1934), the success of which prompted a spate of commissions for caricatures. Bacon stopped making caricatures in 1935, but they include some of her best-known work.

Bacon exhibited frequently, in New York and in major museum exhibitions nationally, showing her prints, drawings, pastels, and watercolors. She had over thirty solo exhibitions at such venues as Montross Gallery, Alfred Stieglitz's Intimate Gallery, and the Downtown Gallery, and was represented by Rehn Galleries and later Kraushaar Galleries. Bacon also taught extensively in the 1930s and 1940s, at the Fieldston School, Art Students League, Hunter College, Temple University, the Corcoran Gallery, and other places. In the 1950s, she returned to painting. She made her last prints in 1955. In the early 1970s, Bacon's eyesight failed, and she eventually went to live with her son in Cape Porpoise, Maine. She died in 1987.

Margaret "Peggy" Bacon was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut, on May 2 1895, the only child of Charles R. Bacon and his wife, both professional painters, and grew up in an artistic and literary environment. In an interview in 1973 with Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, she recalled that "[My parents] were passionate readers of Henry James as fast as his novels came out. Every evening there was reading aloud....[T]here were quantities of books, endless books arriving. And a great deal of charm. They were people of taste. Father was very well-read in French. He spoke French so well that French people mistook him for a Frenchman."

Peggy was largely educated by tutors and governesses until the age of fourteen when she was sent to Kent Place School in Summit, New Jersey. She displayed her artistic talents at an early age and rather than entering college decided to study at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1920 she married fellow student Alexander Brook (with whom she later had two children, Alexander and Belinda) and began her career as artist, writer and teacher.

Peggy Bacon taught at the Corcoran Art School in Washington DC, the Fieldstone School, the Art Students League, Hunter College, and the New School in New York. At the same time, she began exhibiting her pastels, prints, etchings and caricatures in many of the country's major museums. She had had her first one-man show in 1915 and beginning in 1922 she had a show almost every year at various galleries in New York. Like many of her compatriots, she worked for Associated American Artists but did not stay with them long.

Along with her art, Peggy was also a talented writer. She contributed articles, short stories, and witty verse to leading magazines such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the Saturday Review, including a review in verse of The Women, which "earned [me] two lifelong enemies -- Clare Booth Luce and Henry Luce." Her first children's book, The Lion-hearted Kitten, was published in 1926 and several more quickly followed, as well as illustration work on more than sixty books for both children and adults. In 1952 her first novel, a mystery entitled The Inward Eye, was published and won favorable reviews.

In 1934 Bacon won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a few years later an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She retired to Cape Porpoise, Maine in 1961 where she lived until her death in 1987.