John Bacon II (1777–1859)

Sculptor. Born in London, second son of the sculptor John Bacon I. 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. This was a project which had hung fire for the entire course of the 18th century, and whose final rather baroque appearance seems something of an anomaly in the neo-classical age.  A monument of Marquess Cornwallis for Calcutta (1803) combines a replica of John Bacon I’s portrait of the Marquess with allegorical figures by the son. The younger Bacon 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. A number of these, commissioned for churches in India, demonstrate the younger Bacon’s range, some incorporating deathbed scenes, as in the monument to Jane Amelia Russell (c.1808) in St Mary’s Church, Madras, others deploying a wide range of classical and Christian iconography with remarkable decorative effect, as in the monument to Captain George Hardinge (c.1808) for St Thomas’s Cathedral Bombay. Although many of the younger Bacon’s church monuments, particularly after the establishment of a partnership with his pupil, Samuel Manning II, are routine performances, some of them are extraordinarily poignant. None more so perhaps than 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. This won the admiration of Antonio Canova, when he visited London in 1816. 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.

Bibliography: J. Edwards, ‘Bacon, John (1777–1859)’, ODNB (online edn), 2004; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, Liverpool, 2010, pp. 235–37, 284; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 219–20, 254–55; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, p. 58; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 128, 168; 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. 44–54; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 93–94, 133–34; 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. 402–03, 448, 469; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxii, 241–43, 434; M. Whinney (rev. J. Physick), Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, London (1964), 2nd (integrated) edn 1988, pp. 313, 370, 371.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, November 2024