Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/311

 F L A X M A N 299 work of this class and it was work of this class that he at first almost exclusively exhibited 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 Beutley, as a modeller of classic and domestic friezes, plaques, ornamental vessels, and medallion portraits, in those varieties of &quot;jasper&quot; and &quot;basalt&quot; ware which earned in their day so prodigious a reputation for the manu facturers who had conceived and perfected the invention, and of which the examples, dispersed and disregarded during the first fifty years of this century, have now again returned into favour among the curious, and are disputed in sale-rooms at prices greater than they fetched in the first fever of the fashion. 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 extreme 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 one of the greatest figure designers who ever lived should have been employed 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, the very utmost delicacies and severities, of modelling in low relief and on a minute scale. By 1780 Flaxman had begun to earn something in another, and, so to speak, a more legitimate branch of his -profession. This was in 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, of Sirs Moiiey in Gloucester Cathedral, and of a widow comforted by an angel, in the cathedral at Chichester. During the rest of Flaxtnati 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 all the finest qualities of his art are represented. The best are quite unsurpass able for pathos, for simplicity, for an instinct of composition as just, pure, and lovely as that of the Greeks themselves, and for the alliance with those harmonious lines and groupings of the ancients of that spirit of domestic tender ness and innocence which is the secret, and the holiest secret, 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 ouce 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. 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 manu facture 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- Evuque, Frederick Hervey, earl of Bristol and bishop of Deny. He did not, as things fell out, return until the summer of 1 794, 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 funeral monuments, including that of the poet Collins in Chichester Cathedral. But what gained for Flaxman in this interval an immense and European fame was not his work in sculpture proper, but those outline designs to the poets, in which he showed not only to what purpose he had made his own the principles of ancient design in vase-paintings and bas-reliefs, but also by what a natural affinity, better than all mere learning, he was bound to the ancients and belonged to them. The designs for the Iliad and Odyssey were commissioned by Mrs Hare Naylor ; those for Dante by Mr Hope ; those for yEschylus by Lady Spencer. During their homeward journey the Flaxmans travelled through central and northern Italy. On their return they took a house, which they never afterwards left, in Buckingham Street, Fitzroy Square. Immediately afterwards we find a sculptor exhibiting the model of a large monument in the round, that of Lord Mansfield, now in Westminster Abbey, and at the same time publishing a spirited protest against the scheme already entertained by the Directory, and carried out five years later by Napoleon, of equipping at Paris a vast central museum of art with the spoils of conquered Europe. The record of FJaxman s life is henceforth an uneventful record of private affection and contentment, of happy and tenacious industry; with reward not brilliant, but sufficient ; with repute not loud, but loudest in the mouths of those whose praise was best worth having Canova, Schlegel, Fuseli ; of quiet, beloved, modestly enthusiastic, and simply honourable life. He took for pupil a son of Hayley s, who presently afterwards sickened and died. In 1797 he was made an associate of the Royal Academy. Every year he exhibited work of one class or another : occasionally a public monument in the round, like those of Paoli or Captain Montague for Westminister Abbey, and of Nelson or Howe for St Paul s ; more constantly, memorials for churches, with symbolic Acts of Mercy or illustrations of Scripture texts, both commonly in low relief ; and these pious labours he would vary from time to time with a classical piece like those of his earliest predilection. Soon after his election as associate, he published a scheme, half grandiose half childish, for a monument to be erected on Greenwich Hill, in the shape of a Britannia 200 feet high, in honour of the naval victories of his country. In 1800 he was elected full Academician. During the peace of Amiens he went to Paris to see the despoiled treasures now actually collected there, but bore himself according to the spirit of protest that was in him. The next event which makes any mark in his life is his appointment to a chair specially created for him by the Royal Academy the chair of Sculpture : this took place in 1810. We have ample evidence of his thoroughness and judiciousness as a teacher in the Academy schools, and his professorial lectures have been often reprinted. With many excellent observa tions, and with one singular merit, that of doing justice, as in those days justice was hardly ever done, to the sculpture of the mediaeval schools, these lectures lack point and felicity of expression, just as they are reported to have lacked fire in delivery, and are somewhat heavy reading. The most important works that occupied Flaxman in the years next following this appointment were the monument to Mrs Baring in Micheldever church, the richest of all his monuments in relief ; that to Lord Cornwallis, destined for India ; and that to Sir John Moore, for Corunna ; with a pastoral Apollo for Lord Egremont. At this time the antiquarian world was much occupied with the vexed question of the merits of the Elgin marbles, and Flaxman was one of those whose evidence before the parliamentary commission had most weight in favour of the purchase