The only time she really had freedom from this life was when her family was living in Nassau and her parents and grandmother were quarantined because they had contracted typhoid fever.

[1] After this devastating event Bacon and her mother moved to New York City and lived on the West Side in the home of family friends.

Although Bacon started drawing when she was a year and a half old,[2] she did not receive formal training in art until after graduating from Kent Place School.

At the end of 1913, Bacon first studied art at the School of Applied Design for Women but disliked it calling it, "the prissiest, silliest place that ever was.

"[1] She transferred after a few weeks to the School of Fine and Applied Arts on the West Side where she took classes in illustration and life drawing.

[4] From 1915 until 1920, Bacon studied painting with Kenneth Hayes Miller, John Sloan, George Bellows, and others at the Art Students League.

Her circle of friends and acquaintances included Dorothea Schwarcz, Anne Rector, Betty Burroughs, Katherine Schmidt, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Molly Luce, Dorothy Varian, Edmund Duffy, Dick Dyer, David Morrison, and Andrew Dasburg.

Bacon's pastel portraits are distinguished by their intensity of the hues, highly selective and organized palette, and visually satisfying compositions.

[9] Bacon's popular drawings appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, New Republic, Fortune, and Vanity Fair and she exhibited in galleries and museums frequently.

[10] During her time as a fellow she completed 35 satirical portraits of art world figures for a collection called Off With Their Heads!, which was published that same year by Robert M. McBride & Company.

[1] The aim of a caricature is to heighten and intensify to the point of absurdity all the subject's most striking attributes; a caricature should not necessarily stop at ridiculing the features but should include in its extravagant appraisal whatever of the figure may be needed to explain the personality, the whole drawing imparting a spicy and clairvoyant comment upon the subject's peculiarities.In the 1970s Bacon's eyesight began failing and she eventually went to live in Cape Porpoise, Maine.

[14] From June 27, 2012, to November 4, 2012, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture exhibited Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon.