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The extent of flax cultivation in Ireland is considerable, but the acreage has been gradually diminishing during late years. In 1864 it reached the maximum, 301,693 acres; next year it fell to 251,433. After 1869 it declined, there being 229,252 acres in flax crop that year, and only 122,003 in 1872. From this year to 1889 it fluctuated considerably, reaching 157,534 acres in 1880 and dropping to 89,225 acres in 1884. Then for five successive years the acreage was above 108,000. From 1890 to 1905 it only once reached 100,000, while the average in 1903, 1904 and 1905 was a little over 45,000 acres.

FLAXMAN, JOHN (1755–1826), English sculptor and draughtsman, was born on the 6th of July 1755, during a temporary residence of his parents at York. The name John was hereditary in the family, having been borne by his father after a forefather who, according to the family tradition, had fought on the side of parliament at Naseby, and afterwards settled as a carrier or farmer, or both, in Buckinghamshire. John Flaxman, the father of the sculptor, carried on with repute the trade of a moulder and seller of plaster casts at the sign of the Golden Head, New Street, Covent Garden, London. His wife’s maiden name was See, and John was their second son. Within six months of his birth the family returned to London, and in his father’s back shop he spent an ailing childhood. His figure was high-shouldered and weakly, the head very large for the body. His mother having died about his tenth year, his father took a second wife, of whom all we know is that her maiden name was Gordon, and that she proved a thrifty housekeeper and kind stepmother. Of regular schooling the boy must have had some, since he is reputed as having remembered in after life the tyranny of some pedagogue of his youth; but his principal education he picked up for himself at home. He early took delight in drawing and modelling from his father’s stock-in-trade, and early endeavoured to understand those counterfeits of classic art by the light of translations from classic literature.

Customers of his father took a fancy to the child, and helped him with books, advice, and presently with commissions. The two special encouragers of his youth were the painter Romney, and a cultivated clergyman, Mr Mathew, with his wife, in whose house in Rathbone Place the young Flaxman used to meet the best “blue-stocking” society of those days, and, among associates of his own age, the artists Blake and Stothard, who became his closest friends. Before this he had begun to work with precocious success in clay as well as in pencil. At twelve years old he won the first prize of the Society of Arts for a medal, and became a public exhibitor in the gallery of the Free Society of Artists; at fifteen he won a second prize from the Society of Arts and began to exhibit in the Royal Academy, then in the second year of its existence. In the same year, 1770, he entered as an Academy student and won the silver medal. But all these successes were followed by a discomfiture. In the competition for the gold medal of the Academy in 1772, Flaxman, who had made sure of victory, was defeated, the prize being adjudged by the president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, to another competitor named Engleheart. But this reverse proved no discouragement, and indeed seemed to have had a wholesome effect in curing the successful lad of a tendency to conceit and self-sufficiency which made Thomas Wedgwood say of him in 1775: “It is but a few years since he was a most supreme coxcomb.”

He continued to ply his art diligently, both as a student in the schools and as an exhibitor in the galleries of the Academy, occasionally also attempting diversions into the sister art of painting. To the Academy he contributed a wax model of Neptune (1770); four portrait models in wax (1771); a terracotta bust, a wax figure of a child, a figure of History (1772); a figure of Comedy, and a relief of a Vestal (1773). During these years he received a commission from a friend of the Mathew family, for a statue of Alexander. But by heroic and ideal work of this class he could, of course, make no regular livelihood. The means of such a livelihood, however, presented themselves in his twentieth year, when he first received employment from Josiah Wedgwood and his partner Bentley, as a modeller of classic and domestic friezes, plaques, ornamental vessels and medallion portraits, in those varieties of “jasper” and “basalt” ware which earned in their day so great a reputation for the manufacturers who had conceived and perfected the invention. In the same year, 1775, John Flaxman the elder moved from New Street, Covent Garden, to a more commodious house in the Strand (No. 420). For twelve years, from his twentieth to his thirty-second (1775–1787), Flaxman subsisted chiefly by his work for the firm of Wedgwood. It may be urged, of the minute refinements of figure outline and modelling which these manufacturers aimed at in their ware, that they were not the qualities best suited to such a material; or it may be regretted that the gifts of an artist like Flaxman should have been spent so long upon such a minor and half-mechanical art of household decoration; but the beauty of the product it would be idle to deny, or the value of the training which the sculptor by this practice acquired in the delicacies and severities of modelling in low relief and on a minute scale.

By 1780 Flaxman had begun to earn something in another branch of his profession, which was in the future to furnish his chief source of livelihood, viz. the sculpture of monuments for the dead. Three of the earliest of such monuments by his hand are those of Chatterton in the church of St Mary Redcliffe at Bristol (1780), of Mrs Morley in Gloucester cathedral (1784), and of the Rev. T. and Mrs Margaret Ball in the cathedral at Chichester (1785). During the rest of Flaxman’s career memorial bas-reliefs of the same class occupied a principal part of his industry; they are to be found scattered in many churches throughout the length and breadth of England, and in them the finest qualities of his art are represented. The best are admirable for pathos and simplicity, and for the alliance of a truly Greek instinct for rhythmical design and composition with that spirit of domestic tenderness and innocence which is one of the secrets of the modern soul.

In 1782, being twenty-seven years old, Flaxman was married to Anne Denman, and had in her the best of helpmates until almost his life’s end. She was a woman of attainments in letters and to some extent in art, and the devoted companion of her husband’s fortunes and of his travels. They set up house at first in Wardour Street, and lived an industrious life, spending their summer holidays once and again in the house of the hospitable poet Hayley, at Eartham in Sussex. After five years, in 1787, they found themselves with means enough to travel, and set out for Rome, where they took up their quarters in the Via Felice. Records more numerous and more consecutive of Flaxman’s residence in Italy exist in the shape of drawings and studies than in the shape of correspondence. He soon ceased modelling himself for Wedgwood, but continued to direct the work of other modellers employed for the manufacture at Rome. He had intended to return after a stay of a little more than two years, but was detained by a commission for a marble group of a Fury of Athamas, a commission attended in the sequel with circumstances of infinite trouble and annoyance, from the notorious Comte-Évêque, Frederick Hervey, earl of Bristol and bishop of Derry. He did not, as things fell out, return until the summer of 1794, after an absence of seven years,—having in the meantime executed another ideal commission (a “Cephalus and Aurora”) for Mr Hope, and having sent home models for several sepulchral monuments, including one in relief for the poet Collins in Chichester cathedral, and one in the round for Lord Mansfield in Westminster Abbey.