Peggy Bacon papers
name: label: Creator
content: Bacon, Peggy, 1895-1987
label: Names
content: Art Students League (New York, N.Y.) -- Students
label: Names
content: Kraushaar Galleries
label: Names
content: Alder, Jules
label: Names
content: Bacon, Charles Roswell, 1868-1913
label: Names
content: Brook, Alexander, 1898-1980
label: Names
content: Bunner, Rudolph Francis
label: Names
content: Lay, Charles Downing, 1877-1956
label: Names
content: Remsen, Ira, 1846-1927
label: Names
content: Schmidt, Katherine, 1898-1978
label: Names
content: Varian, Dorothy, 1895-1985
topic: label: Occupation
content: Printmakers -- New York (State) -- Woodstock
label: Occupation
content: Illustrators -- New York (State) -- Woodstock
label: Occupation
content: Caricaturists -- New York (State) -- Woodstock
label: Occupation
content: Authors -- New York (State) -- Woodstock
label: Topic
content: Art -- Study and teaching
label: Topic
content: Works of art
label: Topic
content: Women artists
label: Topic
content: Women authors
label: Topic
content: Women printmakers
acqinfo: label: Provenance
content: The collection was donated by Peggy Bacon in 1973 and Kraushaar Galleries in 2008.
creator: label: Creator
content: Bacon, Peggy, 1895-1987
setName: label: See more items in
content: Peggy Bacon papers
abstract: label: Summary
content: The papers of printmaker, illustrator, caricaturist, and writer Peggy Bacon measure 3.6 linear feet and date from 1893 to 1973, with the bulk of materials dating from 1900 to 1936. Much of the collection consists of family correspondence, although writings, photographs, artwork, and personal business records from Bacon's late career are also found.
bioghist: label: Biographical Note
content: 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.
physdesc: label: Extent
content: 4 Linear Feet
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1893-1973
label: Date
content: bulk 1900-1936
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Archives of American Art
identifier: label: Identifier
content: AAA.bacopegg
objectType: label: Type
content: Collection descriptions
label: Type
content: Archival materials
label: Type
content: Photographs
label: Type
content: Drawings
arrangement: label: Arrangement
content: The collection is arranged into 7 series:

Series 1: Biographical Materials, 1893-1913 (Box 1; 2 folders)

Series 2: Correspondence, 1893-1939, 1969-1972 (Boxes 1-3; 3 linear feet)

Series 3: Personal Business Records, 1897-1934, 1963-1972 (Box 4; 0.2 linear feet)

Series 4: Writings, 1905-1920 (Boxes 4-5; 0.3 linear feet)

Series 5: Printed Material, 1905-1935, 1973 (Box 5; 3 folders)

Series 6: Photographs, circa 1900-1963 (Box 5, OV 6; 4 folders)

Series 7: Artwork, undated (Box 5, OVs 6-8; 9 folders)
processinfo: label: Processing Information
content: The collection was originally processed for microfilming upon accession on reels 892-899. The entire collection acquired to date was fully processed, arranged and described by Megan McShea in 2006, and scanned, with funding provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Researchers should note that the final arrangement of the collection as described in this finding aid may not reflect the order of the collection on microfilm.

The 2008 addition was processed by Stephanie Ashley in 2020.
altformavail: label: Alternative Forms Available
content: The bulk of the collection was digitized in 2006 and is available on the Archives of American Art website. 

Printed materials, photographs of works of art, and papers primarily relating to Bacon's relatives have not been digitized and are available on 35 mm microfilm reels 892-899 at Archives of American Art offices, and through interlibrary loan. Drawings by Peggy Bacon donated in 2008 have not been digitized.
genre_format: label: Genre/Form
content: Photographs
label: Genre/Form
content: Drawings
scopecontent: label: Scope and Content Note
content: The papers of printmaker, illustrator, caricaturist, and writer Peggy Bacon measure 3.6 linear feet and date from 1893 to 1973, with the bulk of materials dating from 1900 to 1936. Much of the collection consists of family correspondence, although writings, photographs, artwork, and personal business records from Bacon's late career are also found.

Correspondence is found between Peggy Bacon and her parents, Elizabeth and Charles Roswell Bacon. Letters to her mother describe in detail her life as an art student and artist at the Art Students League; summer schools in Port Jefferson, Long Island and Provincetown, Massachusetts; the Woodstock artists' colony; and her early years in New York City. Letters from her husband, Alexander Brook, to her mother are also present. Letters to Bacon include letters from her early teacher Jonas Lie, and from friends and fellow artists Catherine Wiley, Dorothy Varian, Katherine Schmidt, Anne Rector Duffy, and others. Her parents' extensive correspondence includes letters to her father from the artists Jules Adler, Rudolph Bunner, Ira Remsen, and Charles Downing Lay.

The collection also contains Peggy Bacon's school reports and writing assignments, a marriage certificate, scattered poetry manuscripts and notes by Peggy Bacon, and fiction manuscripts by Charles Roswell Bacon. Personal business records date from the 1960s and 1970s and include publisher's royalty statements, gallery sales statements, and scattered business correspondence with Antoinette Kraushaar and other staff at the Kraushaar Galleries. Photographs depict Bacon and her family, friends, homes, and works of art. Artwork includes several original drawings and sketches by Bacon, as well as artwork by Alexander Brook, Charles Roswell Bacon, and others.
relatedmaterial: label: Related Material
content: Among the other resources relating to Peggy Bacon in the Archives of American Art is an oral history interview with Bacon, May 8, 1973; and letters to Bernice and Harry Lurie from Peggy Bacon, 1969-1977. Additional Peggy Bacon papers are available at Syracuse University.