What is "francis bacon"

Bacon \Bacon\, Francis Bacon \Francis Bacon\prop. n. Francis Bacon. A celebrated English philosopher, jurist, and statesman, son of Sir Nicholas Bacon. Born at York House, London, Jan. 22, 1561: died at Highgate, April 9, 1626, created Baron Verulam July 12, 1618, and Viscount St. Albans Jan. 27, 1621: commonly, but incorrectly, called Lord Bacon. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, April, 1573, to March, 1575, and at Gray's Inn 1575; became attached to the embassy of Sir Amias Paulet in France in 1576; was admitted to the bar in 1582; entered Parliament in 1584; was knighted in 1603; became solicitor-general in 1607, and attorney-general in 1613; was made a privy councilor in 1616, lord keeper in 1617, and lord chancellor in 1618; and was tried in 1621 for bribery, condemned, fined, and removed from office. A notable incident of his career was his connection with the Earl of Essex, which began in July, 1591, remained an intimate friendship until the fall of Essex (1600-01), and ended in Bacon's active efforts to secure the conviction of the earl for treason. (See Essex.) His great fame rests upon his services as a reformer of the methods of scientific investigation; and though his relation to the progress of knowledge has been exaggerated and misunderstood, his reputation as one of the chief founders of modern inductive science is well grounded. His chief works are the "Advancement of Learning," published in English as "The Two Books of Francis Bacon of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human," in 1605; the "Novum organum sive indicia vera de interpretatione naturae," published in Latin, 1620, as a "second part" of the (incomplete) "Instauratio magna"; the "De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum," published in Latin in 1623; "Historia Ventorum" (1622), "Historia Vitae et Mortis" (1623), "Historia Densi et Rari" (posthumously, 1658), "Sylva Sylvarum" (posthumously, 1627), "New Atlantis," "Essays" (1597, 1612, 1625), "De Sapientia Veterum" (1609), "Apothegms New and Old," "History of Henry VII." (1622). Works edited by Ellis, Spedding, and Heath (7 vols. 1857); Life by Spedding (7 vols. 1861, 2 vols. 1878). See Shakspere.
--Century Dict. 1906.

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 15619 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, and author. He served both as Attorney General and as Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.

Bacon has been called the father of empiricism. His works argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only upon inductive and careful observation of events in nature. Most importantly, he argued this could be achieved by use of a skeptical and methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves. While his own practical ideas about such a method, the Baconian method, did not have a long lasting influence, the general idea of the importance and possibility of a skeptical methodology makes Bacon the father of scientific method. This marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, the practical details of which are still central in debates about science and methodology today.

Bacon was generally neglected at court by Queen Elizabeth, but after the ascension of King James I in 1603, Bacon was knighted. He was later created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Alban in 1621. Because he had no heirs, both titles became extinct upon his death in 1626, at 65 years of age. Bacon died of pneumonia, with one account by John Aubrey stating that he had contracted the condition while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an English Elizabethan philosopher, statesman and essayist.

Francis Bacon may also refer to:

• Francis Bacon (artist) (1909–1992), figurative painter
• Francis Bacon (judge) (1587–1657), English judge
• Francis Bacon (Ipswich MP) (1600–1663), English politician
• Francis Thomas Bacon (1904–1992), English engineer who developed the hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell
• Francis Bacon (cricketer) (1869–1915), English cricketer

Francis Bacon (30 September 1600 – c. September 1663) was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1645 and 1660. He supported the Parliamentary cause in the English Civil War.

Sir Francis Bacon (1587 – 1657) was an English judge.

Francis Hugh Bacon (24 June 1869 – 31 October 1915) was an English cricketer. Bacon was a right-handed batsman who was a right-arm slow bowler.

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, grotesque, emotionally charged and raw imagery. His painterly abstracted figures are typically isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon took up painting in his early 20s but worked sporadically and uncertainly until his mid-30s. He drifted as a highly complex bon vivant, homosexual, gambler and interior decorator and designer of furniture, rugs and bathroom tiles. He later admitted that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest.

His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. Remarking on the cultural significance of Three Studies, the art critic John Russell observed that "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one...can confuse the two."

Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his artistic output typically focused on a single subject or format for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His output can be crudely described as sequences or variations on a single motif; beginning with the 1930s Picasso-informed Furies, moving on to the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures, the 1950s screaming popes, and the mid-to-late 1950s animals and lone figures. These were followed by his early 1960s variations on crucifixion scenes. From the mid-1960s he mainly produced portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single or triptych panels. Following the 1971 suicide of his lover George Dyer, his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death. The climax of this later period is marked by masterpieces, including his 1982's "Study for Self-Portrait" and Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86.

Despite his bleak existentialist outlook, solidified in the public mind through his articulate and vivid series of interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon in person was highly engaging and charismatic, articulate, well-read and unapologetically gay. He was a prolific artist, but nonetheless spent many of the evenings of his middle age eating, drinking and gambling in London's Soho with like-minded friends such as Lucian Freud (though the two fell out in the 1950s, for reasons neither ever explained), John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Daniel Farson and Jeffrey Bernard. After Dyer's suicide he largely distanced himself from this circle, and while his social life was still active and his passion for gambling and drinking continued, he settled into a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards.

Bacon was equally reviled and acclaimed during his lifetime. Art critic Robert Hughes described him as "the most implacable, lyric artist in late 20th-century England, perhaps in all the world" and along with Willem de Kooning as "the most important painter of the disquieting human figure in the 50's of the 20th century." Francis Bacon was the subject of two Tate retrospectives and a major showing in 1971 at the Grand Palais. Since his death his reputation and market value have grown steadily, and his work is amongst the most acclaimed, expensive and sought-after. In the late 1990s a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed, including early 1950s popes and 1960s portraits, reemerged to set record prices at auction. On 12 November 2013 his Three Studies of Lucian Freud set the world record as the most expensive piece of art sold at auction, selling for $142,405,000, until exceeded by the sale of Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger in May 2015.