The name of Bacon in the 17th century inevitably suggests Sir Francis, first baron Verulam and viscount of St Albans, Lord Chancellor and natural scientist, philosopher and writer. Of an acutely inquiring mind, Sir Francis died of a chill caught trying to deep-freeze chickens. Nathaniel Bacon (1585–1627) was his nephew, and showed some of the same characteristics, being not only devoted to horticulture but also, more surprisingly, a painter of considerable talent and distinction, who experimented with new colours and varnishes. He is currently celebrated at Tate Britain in Nathaniel Bacon: Artist, Gentleman and Gardener (until 17 April), a focus exhibition built around a major painting which the gallery acquired in 1995 — ‘Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit’. It’s an impressive picture, far superior in terms of dramatic display and psychological realism to the kind of Netherlandish model it is based on, such as Joachim Beuckelaer’s ‘Elements’, recently shown in the National Gallery’s exhibition The Stuff of Life. Judging by this painting alone, Bacon is an artist of convincing presence and originality.
Only nine pictures by Nathaniel Bacon survive, and one is a tiny landscape on copper now in the Ashmolean (originally in the collection of John Tradescant the Elder, the great gardener). If this picture is by Bacon — and it’s signed NB, which was not his habit — then ‘it is the first-known pure landscape painting by an English-born artist’, to quote the Tate curator Karen Hearn, who has written the informative accompanying booklet. It’s a dark little picture in an ebony frame, though not without interest, particularly in the painting of foliage, and there are so few paintings by Bacon that all sensible attributions are welcome. The rest of his exiguous oeuvre is divided between portraiture and still life with figures, though an 18th-century observer mentions two more classical subjects, now lost: ‘Ceres with fruit and flowers’ and ‘Hercules and Hydra Overcome’.
This display, which brings together seven of Bacon’s nine paintings, is mounted in a far room on the first floor of the Tate, above the galleries in which Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec is drawing to a close.
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