Peggy Bacon

American (1895-1987)

Born in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1895, Peggy Bacon was a painter, caricaturist, illustrator, lithographer, writer and art educator. In 1914 Bacon moved to New York City where she studied at the Art Students League with George Bellows, John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller. She became part of the New York social realist group of artists later named the Fourteenth Street School and would summer in the artists’ communities of Woodstock and Croton, New York. After receiving the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1934, she published Off With Their Heads!, a series of satirical caricatures of Americans, including Franklin Roosevelt, Georgia O’Keefe and Diego Rivera. Beginning in the 1940s  Bacon often worked in Maine, moving there in 1961. Her sharp wit was evident in her contributions to the New Yorker and Vanity Fair as well as in the more than 60 books she illustrated, including several publications of her own short stories and poetry.

Bacon’s first artistic showcase was at the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1918, and she had over 30 solo shows throughout her career. Bacon’s prints are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. In 1980, she won the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for her lifelong contribution to illustration and graphic art.