The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (31 page)

(1639–1709).
Italian painter, born in Genoa and active mainly in Rome, where he settled in 1657 and became a protégé of
Bernini
. He achieved success as a painter of altarpieces and portraits (he painted each of the seven popes from Alexander VII to Clement XI), but is remembered mainly for his decorative work and above all for his
Adoration of the Name of Jesus
(1674–9) on the ceiling of the nave of the Gesù. This is one of the supreme masterpieces of
illusionistic
decoration, ranking alongside
Pozzo's
slightly later ceiling in S. Ignazio. The
stucco
figures that are so brilliantly combined with the painted decoration (from the ground it is not always possible to tell which is which) are the work of Bernini's pupil Antonio Raggi (1624–86).

 
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Backer , Jacob Adriaensz
.

(1608–51)
. Dutch portrait and history painter, active mainly in Amsterdam, where he had a prosperous career. He is said to have studied with
Rembrandt
, and he imitated his style so successfully that attributions have sometimes been disputed between them (see
BOL
). His best-known painting is the beautiful
Portrait of a Boy in Grey
(Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1634). His nephew,
Adriaen Backer
(1630/2–84), also had a successful career as a portraitist in Amsterdam.

 
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(1909–92).
British painter, born in Dublin of English parents. He left home in 1925 at the age of 16 and moved to London, where he worked for a time as an interior decorator. In the late 1920s he lived in Berlin and then Paris (where he was powerfully affected by an exhibition of
Picasso's
work), then returned to London in 1929. He had no formal training as a painter. In the 1930s he began exhibiting in London commercial galleries, but he destroyed much of his early work and dropped out of sight until 1945, when his
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
(Tate, London), painted in the previous year, was exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery and made him overnight the most controversial painter in the country. Visitors to the exhibition were shocked by ‘images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut snap at the thought of them. Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal, and they were confined in a low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They could bite, probe, and suck, and they had very long eel-like necks, but their functioning in other respects was mysterious. Ears and mouths they had, but two at least were sightless. One was unpleasantly bandaged’ (John Russell ,
Francis Bacon
, 1971). The emotional impact that Bacon's work makes depends not only on his imagery—characteristically single figures in isolation and despair—but also on his handling of paint, by means of which he smudged and twisted faces and bodies into ill-defined jumbled protuberances suggestive of formless, slug-like creatures from some nightmare fantasy: ‘I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime.’. From the 1950s Bacon's work was shown in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the USA and won him an international reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art. In the catalogue of a major retrospective exhibition of his work held at the Tate Gallery in 1985, the Director of the gallery, Alan Bowness, called Bacon the ‘greatest living painter’, a judgement in which many critics at the time concurred, although others found the unrelenting pessimism of his vision hard to take. Alongside his reputation as a painter he built up a sulphurous personal legend on account of his promiscuous homosexuality, hard drinking, and heavy gambling.

 
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(1740–99).
English sculptor. He started work as a modeller in a porcelain factory and this experience left a permanent mark on his style as a sculptor, as his work, even in marble, is soft, often showing much pretty detail. The favour of George III gained him the important commission for the monument to the Earl of Chatham (the Elder Pitt) (Westminster Abbey, 1779–83), and he also carried out much sculpture at Somerset House, but his finest work is the monument to Thomas Guy (Guy's Hospital, 1779), showing the founder succouring a sick man. His practice was carried on by his son
John
(1777–1859).

 
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(1585–1627).
The first English amateur painter of note. He was a high-born country gentleman, nephew of the Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon. Only a handful of paintings survive (mainly at Gorhambury House, Herts.); with the exception of a miniature landscape on copper in the manner of
Bril
, described as the earliest British landscape (Ashmolean, Oxford), they are either portraits or kitchen still lifes. His ambitious full-length self-portrait at Gorhambury displays a more coherent realization of space, greater subtlety of colouring, and acuter sense of characterization than had hitherto been achieved in English portraiture and shows he was the equal of
Mytens
or Cornelius
Johnson
, the finest portraitists in England before the arrival of van
Dyck
.

 
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