Sculptor. Born in Southwark, son of a cloth worker. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a porcelain manufacturer, with whom he learned to model figurines. He soon began to aspire to a more elevated form of art, and from 1759 was regularly in receipt of awards for his compositions from the Society of Arts. From about 1767 he was employed as modeller at Mrs Coade’s artificial stone factory in Lambeth. In 1768 he entered the newly opened Royal Academy Schools. In defiance of the fashion of the age, Bacon never travelled to Rome, a fact which won him additional credit from some of his admirers. One of these was George III, a bust of whom was commissioned by William Markham, Archbishop of York, for Christ Church College, Oxford. Replicas of this marble bust, for which the king sat to Bacon in 1770, were subsequently produced for other locations. Bacon became a full RA in 1777. The seal of official approval for his art was conferred with the two commissions which he received for monuments to William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, one for the London Guildhall (1778–82), the other for Westminster Abbey (1779–83). From this time, he took a lead in the celebration of men whose virtue or learning were esteemed to have been a credit to the nation: the memorial to Thomas Guy, Guy’s Hospital, London (1779) and statues of John Howard, Samuel Johnson and Sir William Jones in St Paul’s Cathedral (1795–59). He was exceptional amongst the British sculptors of his time in being able to cast in bronze, an ability demonstrated in his statue of George III with the River Thames in the courtyard of Somerset House (1789). In the 1790s Bacon received commissions from the East India Company, one of which, a statue of Marquess Cornwallis in Roman armour, executed between 1793 and 1796, originally stood in East India House in Leadenhall Street, London, but after that building’s demolition, was re-erected in the Foreign Office in Whitehall. He was a prolific and financially successful sculptor of church monuments. His architectural and decorative sculpture ranges from keystones and chimneypieces to the very large and ambitious pediment of East India House (1797–99, destroyed), which was completed by his son John Bacon II. His great abilities as a sculptor were disagreeably offset by what some saw as a smug and smarmily pious manner.
Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland, Liverpool, 2000, pp.127–29, 354–55; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. xi–xii, 190–94, 223–24, 310, 392, 420; A. Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects (6 vols, 1829–33), London, vol. 3, 1830, pp. 200–46; Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1799, pp. 808–10 (obituary); F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xvi, 237–38, 277–78, 344; D. Merritt and F. Greenacre, with K. Eustace, Public Sculpture of Bristol, Liverpool, 2011, pp. lii, lii, liv; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. xv, 126–28, 167–68; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, Liverpool, 2010, pp. 114–15, 166–67, 283–84; N. Penny, Church Monuments in Romantic England, New Haven and London, 1977, passim; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 35–44; M.A. Steggles, ‘Bacon, John (1740–1799)’, ODNB (online edn), (2004), 2008; M.A. Steggles and R. Barnes, British Sculpture in India, Kirstead, 2011, passim; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. xviii, xix, 98, 166–70, 174, 301, 317, 325, 354, 415–16, 447–48; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxii, 241–43, 252–54, 433–34; M. Whinney (rev. J. Physick), Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, London (1964), 2nd (integrated) edn 1988, pp. 303–13; D. White and E. Norman, Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool, 2015, pp. 270–73.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, November 2024
W.C. Edwards, after John Russell, Portrait of John Bacon R.A., line engraving on paper, 1830, Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Creative Commons CC by NC)
