Nathaniel Bacon

Nathaniel Bacon 1647-76, leader of Bacon's Rebellion in colonial Virginia. An aristocrat (he was kin to Francis Bacon, had been educated at Cambridge and Gray's Inn, and was a member of the governor's council), Bacon nevertheless became the champion of the discontented frontiersmen after only two years' residence in the colony. When he died suddenly from the effects of malaria, the revolt collapsed.

Bacon, Sir Nathaniel (1585–1627). The first English amateur painter of note, a high-born country gentleman, nephew of the Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon. Fewer than a dozen paintings by him are known; with the exception of a miniature landscape on copper in the manner of Bril, which has been claimed as the earliest British landscape(Ashmolean Mus., Oxford), they are either portraits (mainly of members of his family) or kitchen still lifes (Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit, c.1625, Tate, London). His ambitious full-length self-portrait (Gorhambury, Hertfordshire, c.1620), displays a more coherent realization of space, greater subtlety of colouring, and sharper characterization than had hitherto been achieved in English portraiture and shows he was the equal of Mytens or Cornelius Johnson, the most renowned portraitists in England before the arrival of van Dyck.