Nathaniel Bacon (painter)

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Sir Nathaniel Bacon, Knight of the Bath (1585–1627), was an English painter, landowner and gardener from Culford, Suffolk. He specialized in kitchen and market scenes with large vegetables and fruit, often with a young woman. His best-known work is The Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit, now in the Tate Gallery in London. He painted in a Dutch and Flemish style common for such pictures. Only nine of his paintings survive, and a portrait in Government House, Sydney has been identified as his wife, Jane, Lady Cornwallis.

Bacon is credited with one of the first known British landscapes and he also painted self-portraits and other portraits. He was made a Knight of the Bath in 1625 for Charles I’s coronation. He was the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon and the half-brother of the philosopher Francis Bacon, which gave him political connections.

In 1613 or 1614 he married Jane Cornwallis, widow of Sir William Cornwallis and mother of Frederick Cornwallis, 1st Baron Cornwallis. He died in 1627 at age 42, probably from tuberculosis, and was buried at Culford Hall. Their daughter Jane died at age three later that year and was buried with him. A second daughter, Anne, married Sir Thomas Meautys in 1639; Anne, Lady Drury, was his sister, and it is thought he influenced the paintings in Lady Drury’s Closet.

Bacon is commemorated at St Mary’s Church, Culford, with a monument by the sculptor Nicholas Stone. His brother Sir Edmund Bacon saw the monument being made in 1628 and noted its progress.