Hectic Life

Hurry across Fourth Avenue at Fourteenth Street in this New York City scene by Peggy Bacon.

Joshua Taylor, former director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, wrote, "Peggy Bacon's art is an art of infinite particularity—which in her case does not mean the recording of detail, but the alertness to just those features that set each person and each moment apart." What specifics do you think Bacon captured in the frozen moment of Heavy Traffic?

Born on this day in 1895, Peggy Bacon was a painter, portrait painter, caricaturist, illustrator, lithographer, writer, and art educator. Her sharp wit was evident in her contributions to the New Yorker and Vanity Fair as well as in the more than sixty books she illustrated, including several publications of her own short stories and poetry. Bacon's portrait (shown below) comes from our Peter A. Juley and Son Collection.

Source: Joan Stahl. American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995).

Pictured top: Peggy Bacon, 1895–1987, Heavy Traffic (Hurry Up) (Hectic Life), about 1941, drypoint on paper, 7 x 6 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Frank McClure.

Pictured bottom: Portrait of Peggy Bacon, 1895-1987, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Peter A. Juley and Son Collection.