Francis Bacon, c. 1618

Portrait of Sir Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban

Author: John Vanderbank, 1731?, after unknown artist (circa 1618). Medium: oil on canvas. Dimensions: 30 1/8 in. x 24 7/8 in. (765 mm x 632 mm). Source: National Portrait Gallery 520. Transferred from British Museum, 1879. Licence: CC by-nc-nd/3.0.  The British Museum also has a large collection of contemporary engraved portraits of Bacon.

Bacon was made Lord Chancellor in 1618 and created Baron Verulam on 12 July of that year.  This image portrays him at the height of his status, power, and influence, before his impeachment in 1621.

Introductory resources 

An introduction to Bacon and Baconisn science is provided by Patricia Fara, Stephen Pumfrey, and Rhodri Lewis on Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' (45 minutes, 2009). 'Francis Bacon was a lawyer and political schemer who climbed the greasy pole of Jacobean politics and then fell down it again. But he is most famous for developing an idea of how science should be done - a method that he hoped would slough off the husk of ancient thinking and usher in a new age. It is called Baconian Method and it has influenced and inspired scientists from Bacon's own time to the present day.'

In the BBC's 'A History of Ideas', Justin Champion provides a briefer introduction (11 minutes, 2015) focusing on Bacon's religious thought and reading of Greek myths: 'Optimistic about man's ingenuity and the potential perfectibility of human society he saw also that men were weak. Nature might have been laid out by God as a kind of book for man to read but individual humans were as likely to be motivated by greed, folly and pride as good intentions. He explored this idea in his book of 1609, The Wisdom of the Ancients, where he used the example of Daedalus, the most ingenious of inventors from Greek Myth to consider the ambiguities of technical progress. Daedalus inventions were truly marvellous but his pride and lack of forethought led to disaster for all around him, not least his son Icarus who perished testing out one his father's extraordinary inventions.'