WALKING WITH BACON

 I was reading about Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1662), philosopher, writer, begetter of the Baconian method of scientific investigation, and latterly a disgraced politician in the days when politicians were capable of grace.

 

He also had a lot to say about gardens, and from the late 1590s he was responsible for the grounds of Gray’s Inn,  known as The Walks.  In 1702 it looked like this:

 

Like this in 1804:

currently like this:

 

Bacon’s Walks were a place to go for a walk, and a fashionable one at that, as recorded by Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn.  I suppose they're less fashionable now; a private garden but open to the polloi sometimes.

 

Polymath though he was, Bacon seems not to have been much of a walker.  John Aubrey’s Brief Lives contains this passage, ‘I remember Sir John Danvers told me that his lordship (Bacon) much delighted in his curious garden at Chelsea and as he was walking there one time he fell down in a dead swoon.  My Lady Danvers rubbed his face, temples etc and gave him cordial water: as soon as he came to himself, said he ‘Madam, I am no footman.’” I can’t help feeling I might be missing something in that reply.

 

And here’s an illustration by Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton titled, ‘Accompanied by a friend to jot down his thoughts, Sir Francis Bacon takes a walk in his garden.’

 

I made a note to go for a wander around The Walks just as soon as the weather warms up, and while I had this in mind a couple of days ago as walking in London, around the back of the Royal Academy, what was the old Museum of Mankind, and blow me down, there was a statue of Sir Francis Bacon, which of course I'd seen before but never took any notice of:

Sir Francis Bacon was a quotable man – “knowledge is power” that’s one of his - but of course he is not the only Francis Bacon in the world.  This is how he’s remembered on goodreads.com:

 

That, of course, is the wrong Francis Bacon, the one seen below, ‘Francis Bacon Walking on Primrose Hill’ by Bill Brandt.