66 x 96cm (26 x 37 13/16in)
Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, 1889, no. 563.
Never more to hear that silent voice, Her smile to meet no more is the picture that Bacon himself described as 'my first success...which was painted when I was 23'. It was his first submission to the Royal Academy and is a fine example of the British social realism that had started in the 1870s when artists such as Luke Fildes (1843-1927) and Frank Holl (1845-1888) caused a sensation with their depiction of the harsh realities of contemporary life. The present lot was painted in 1889 when the move towards the portrayal of both the rural and urban poor was well established, some of it following the French example of Bastien-Lepage, and some of it keeping a stronger connection with the British narrative tradition. Bacon sits more in the latter camp and the present lot has a clear storyline which he is careful to cultivate, with the soldier's uniform and his reaction to the letter providing visual clues to the story behind the picture. Bacon was first noticed for his black and white illustrations as a teenager so it is no surprise the narrative element was always strong in his work.
'The idea which I sought to embody in that canvas was that of a young soldier who had left his home as a boy, and on returning to his native village went into a wayside tavern where two navvies, one of whom had known him in his early days, were sitting' (from an interview with Bacon, Otago Witness, issue 2887, 21 July 1909, p.82). It shows a soldier reading a letter finding out the news his long lost love is dead. This was a popular theme at the time with Frank Bramley's A Hopeless Dawn being painted the preceding year and gaining great recognition at the Summer Exhibition.
Later in his career Bacon would go on to become a great recorder of the higher echelons of Edwardian society and also of the patriotic and leisurely bourgeois subjects beloved of that age. In contrast this painting shows an empathy with the common man which was a theme that preoccupied the early careers of many of his contemporaries. Many of these artists who started out as social realists were 'drawn inexorably down the primrose path to fashionable portrait painting', in the words of Christopher Wood, and are now more celebrated for their uncompromising early work. Bacon is indicative of this wider trend, this is perhaps more understandable if seen in the context of his family life with a large household and seven children to support.
Despite the shift in emphasis of his subject matter, one constant throughout Bacon's career was the incredible technical accomplishment, already evident in the present lot, painted at the age of 23. The arrangement of the figures, the strong lighting and subtle palette heightened by the strong line of vermilion red down the soldier's trousers all speak of an artist who was in full control of his skills and had already mastered his technique. The models he used were not professional models but real people who agreed to sit for him, the soldier actually having served in the Zulu wars. He has not painted them as types, but as honest individuals whose expressions and pose give them a dignity and a sense of drama well suited to the subject. It is a painting that gives an insight into Bacon's early ambitions as an artist and his place within a group of artists who sought to reject sentimentality in their honest depictions of the hard lives of ordinary citizens. A visual equivalent to the more developed literary realism embodied in the work of George Eliot and other great writers of the Victorian era.
