III.
JOHN GIBSON, SCULPTOR.
In most cases, the working man who raises himself to wealth and
position, does so by means of trade, which is usually the natural
outgrowth of his own special handicraft or calling. If he attains, not
only to riches, but to distinction as well, it is in general by
mechanical talent, the direction of the mind being naturally biased by
the course of one's own ordinary occupations. England has been
exceptionally rich in great engineers and inventive geniuses of such
humble origin--working men who have introduced great improvements in
manufactures or communications; and our modern English civilization has
been immensely influenced by the lives of these able and successful
mechanical toilers. From Brindley, the constructor of the earliest great
canal, to Joseph Gillott, the inventor of the very steel pen with which
this book is written; from Arkwright the barber who fashioned the first
spinning-machine, to Crompton the weaver, whose mule gave rise to the
mighty Manchester cotton trade; from Newcomen, who made the first rough
attempt at a steam-engine, to Stephenson, who sent the iron horse from
end to end of the land,--the chief mechanical improvements in the
country have almost all been due to the energy, intelligence, and skill
of our labouring population. The English mind is intensely practical,
and the English working man, for the last two centuries at least, has
been mainly distinguished for his great mechanical aptitude, bursting
out, here and there, in exceptional persons, under the form of
exceedingly high inventive genius.
At our very doors, however, there is a small nation of largely different
blood and of wholly different speech from our own; a nation forming a
part of our own kingdom, even more closely than the Scotch or the Irish,
and yet in some respects further from us in mind and habit of life than
either; a nation marked rather by the poetical and artistic, than by the
mechanical and practical temperament--the ancient and noble Welsh
people. It would hardly be reasonable to expect from the Welsh exactly
the same kind of success in life which we often find in English workmen;
the aims and ideals of the two races are so distinct, and it must be
frankly confessed the advantage is not always on the side of the
Englishman. The Welsh peasants, living among their own romantic hills
and valleys, speaking their own soft and exquisite language, treasuring
their own plaintive and melodious poetry, have grown up with an intense
love for beauty and the beautiful closely intwined into the very warp
and woof of their inmost natures. They have almost always a natural
refinement of manner and delicacy of speech which is unfortunately too
often wanting amongst our rougher English labouring classes, especially
in large towns. They are intensely musical, producing a very large
proportion of the best English singers and composers. They are fond of
literature, for which they have generally some natural capacity, and in
which they exercise themselves to an extent unknown, probably, among
people of their class in any other country. At the local meetings of
bards (as they call themselves) in Wales, it is not at all uncommon to
hear that the first prize for Welsh poetry has been carried off by a
shepherd, and the first prize for Welsh prose composition by a domestic
servant. In short, the susceptibilities of the race run rather toward
art and imagination, than toward mere money-making and practical
ingenuity.
John Gibson, sculptor, of Rome, as he loved to call himself, was a
remarkable embodiment, in many ways, of this self-respecting, artistic,
ideal Welsh peasant temperament. In a little village near Conway, in
North Wales, there lived at the end of the last century a petty
labouring market gardener of the name of Gibson, who knew and spoke no
other tongue than his native Welsh. In 1790, his wife gave birth to a
son whom they christened John, and who grew up, a workman's child, under
the shadow of the great castle, and among the exquisite scenery of the
placid land-locked Conway river. John Gibson's parents, like the mass of
labouring Welsh people, were honest, God-fearing folk, with a great
earnestness of principle, a profound love of truth, and a hatred of all
mean or dirty actions. They brought up the boy in these respects in the
way he should go; and when he was old he indeed did not depart from
them. Throughout his life, John Gibson was remarkable for his calm,
earnest, straightforward simplicity, a simplicity which seemed almost
childish to those who could not understand so grand and uncommon and
noble a nature as his.
From his babyhood, almost, the love of art was innate in the boy; and
when he was only seven years old, he began to draw upon a slate a scene
that particularly pleased him--a line of geese sailing upon the smooth
glassy surface of a neighbouring pond. He drew them as an ordinary child
almost always does draw--one goose after another, in profile, as though
they were in procession, without any attempt at grouping or perspective
in any way. His mother praised the first attempt, saying to him in
Welsh, "Indeed, Jack, this is very like the geese;" and Jack, encouraged
by her praise, decided immediately to try again. But not being an
ordinary child, he determined this time to do better; he drew the geese
one behind the other as one generally sees them in actual nature. His
mother then asked him to draw a horse; and "after gazing long and often
upon one," he says, "I at last ventured to commit him to the slate."
When he had done so, the good mother was even more delighted. So, to try
his childish art, she asked him to put a rider on the horse's back. Jack
went out once more, "carefully watched men on horseback," and then
returning, made his sketch accordingly. In this childish reminiscence
one can see already the first workings of that spirit which made Gibson
afterwards into the greatest sculptor of all Europe. He didn't try even
then to draw horse or man by mere guess-work; he went out and studied
the subject at first hand. There are in that single trait two great
elements of success in no matter what line of life--supreme carefulness,
and perfect honesty of workmanship.
When Jack was nine years old, his father determined to emigrate to
America, and for that purpose went to Liverpool to embark for the United
States. But when he had got as far as the docks, Mrs. Gibson, good soul,
frightened at the bigness of the ships (a queer cause of alarm), refused
plumply ever to put her foot on one of them. So her husband, a dutiful
man with a full sense of his wife's government upon him, consented
unwillingly to stop in Liverpool, where he settled down to work again as
a gardener. Hitherto, Jack and his brothers had spoken nothing but
Welsh; but at Liverpool he was put to school, and soon learned to
express himself correctly and easily in English. Liverpool was a very
different place for young Jack Gibson from Conway: there were no hills
and valleys there, to be sure, but there were shops--such shops! all
full of the most beautiful and highly coloured prints and caricatures,
after the fashion of the days when George IV. was still Prince Regent.
All his spare time he now gave up to diligently copying the drawings
which he saw spread out in tempting array before him in the shop-
windows. Flattening his little nose against the glass panes, he used to
look long and patiently at a single figure, till he had got every detail
of its execution fixed firmly on his mind's eye; and then he would go
home hastily and sketch it out at once while the picture was still quite
fresh in his vivid memory. Afterwards he would return to the shop-
window, and correct his copy by the original till it was completely
finished. No doubt the boy did all this purely for his own amusement;
but at the same time he was quite unconsciously teaching himself to draw
under a very careful and accurate master--himself. Already, however, he
found his paintings had patrons, for he sold them when finished to the
other boys; and once he got as much as sixpence for a coloured picture
of Napoleon crossing the Alps--"the largest sum," he says brightly in
his memoirs long after, "I had yet received for a work of art."
Opportunities always arise for those who know how to use them. Little
Jack Gibson used to buy his paper and colours at a stationer's in
Liverpool, who one day said to him kindly, "My lad, you're a constant
customer here: I suppose you're a painter." "Yes, sir," Jack answered,
with childish self-complacency, "I do paint." The stationer, who had
himself studied at the Royal Academy, asked him to bring his pictures on
view; and when Jack did so, his new friend, Mr. Tourmeau, was so much
pleased with them that he lent the boy drawings to copy, and showed him
how to draw for himself from plaster casts. These first amateur lessons
must have given the direction to all Gibson's later life: for when the
time came for him to choose a trade, he was not set to till the ground
like his father, but was employed at once on comparatively artistic and
intelligent handicraft.
Jack was fourteen when his father apprenticed him to a firm of cabinet-
makers. For the first year, he worked away contentedly at legs and
mouldings; but as soon as he had learnt the rudiments of the trade he
persuaded his masters to change his indentures, and let him take the
more suitable employment of carving woodwork for ornamental furniture.
He must have been a good workman and a promising boy, one may be sure,
or his masters would never have countenanced such a revolutionary
proceeding on the part of a raw apprentice. Young Gibson was delighted
with his new occupation, and pursued it so eagerly that he carved even
during his leisure hours from plaster casts. But after another year, as
ill-luck or good fortune would have it, he happened to come across a
London marble-cutter, who had come down to Liverpool to carve flowers in
marble for a local firm. The boy was enchanted with his freer and more
artistic work; when the marble-cutter took him over a big yard, and
showed him the process of modelling and cutting, he began to feel a deep
contempt for his own stiff and lifeless occupation of wood-carving.
Inspired with the desire to learn this higher craft, he bought some
clay, took it home, and moulded it for himself after all the casts he
could lay his hands on. Mr. Francis, the proprietor of the marble works,
had a German workman in his employ of the name of Luge, who used to
model small figures, chiefly, no doubt, for monumental purposes. Young
Gibson borrowed a head of Bacchus that Luge had composed, and made a
copy of it himself in clay. Mr. Francis was well pleased with this early
attempt, and also with a clever head of Mercury in marble, which Gibson
carved in his spare moments.
The more the lad saw of clay and marble, the greater grew his distaste
for mere woodwork. At last, he determined to ask Mr. Francis to buy out
his indentures from the cabinet-makers, and let him finish his
apprenticeship as a sculptor. But unfortunately the cabinet-makers found
Gibson too useful a person to be got rid of so easily: they said he was
the most industrious lad they had ever had; and so his very virtues
seemed as it were to turn against him. Not so, really: Mr. Francis
thought so well of the boy that he offered the masters L70 to be quit of
their bargain; and in the end, Gibson himself having made a very firm
stand in the matter, he was released from his indentures and handed over
finally to Mr. Francis and a sculptor's life.
And now the eager boy was at last "truly happy." He had to model all day
long, and he worked away at it with a will. Shortly after he went to Mr.
Francis's yard, a visitor came upon business, a magnificent-looking old
man, with snowy hair and Roman features. It was William Roscoe, the
great Liverpool banker, himself a poor boy who had risen, and who had
found time not only to build up for himself an enormous fortune, but
also to become thoroughly well acquainted with literature and art by the
way. Mr. Roscoe had written biographies of Lorenzo de Medici, the great
Florentine, and of Leo X., the art-loving pope; and throughout his whole
life he was always deeply interested in painting and sculpture and
everything that related to them. He was a philanthropist, too, who had
borne his part bravely in the great struggle for the abolition of the
slave trade; and to befriend a struggling lad of genius like John Gibson
was the very thing that was nearest and dearest to his benevolent heart.
Mr. Francis showed Roscoe the boy's drawings and models; and Roscoe's
appreciative eye saw in them at once the visible promise of great things
to be. He had come to order a chimney-piece for his library at Allerton,
where his important historical works were all composed; and he
determined that the clever boy should have a chief hand in its
production. A few days later he returned again with a valuable old
Italian print. "I want you to make a bas-relief in baked clay," he said
to Gibson, "from this print for the centre of my mantelpiece." Gibson
was overjoyed. The print was taken from a fresco of Raphael's in the
Vatican at Rome, and Gibson's work was to reproduce it in clay in low
relief, as a sculpture picture. He did so entirely to his new patron's
satisfaction, and this his first serious work is now duly preserved in
the Liverpool Institution which Mr. Roscoe had been mainly instrumental
in founding.
Roscoe had a splendid collection of prints and drawings at Allerton; and
he invited the clever Welsh lad over there frequently, and allowed him
to study them all to his heart's content. To a lad like John Gibson,
such an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the works of Raphael and
Michael Angelo was a great and pure delight. Before he was nineteen, he
began to think of a big picture which he hoped to paint some day; and he
carried it out as well as he was able in his own self-taught fashion.
For as yet, it must be remembered, Gibson had had no regular artistic
instruction: there was none such, indeed, to be had at all in Liverpool
in his day; and there was no real art going on in the town in any way.
Mr. Francis, his master, was no artist; nor was there anybody at the
works who could teach him: for as soon as Mr. Francis found out the full
measure of Gibson's abilities, he dismissed his German artist Luge, and
put the clever boy entirely in his place. At this time, Gibson was only
receiving six shillings a week as wages; but Mr. Francis got good prices
for many of his works, and was not ashamed even to put his own name upon
the promising lad's artistic performances.
Mr. Roscoe did not merely encourage the young sculptor; he set him also
on the right road for ultimate success. He urged Gibson to study
anatomy, without which no sculpture worthy of the name is possible.
Gibson gladly complied, for he knew that Michael Angelo had been a great
anatomist, and Michael was just at that moment the budding sculptor's
idol and ideal. But how could he learn? A certain Dr. Vose was then
giving lectures on anatomy to young surgeons at Liverpool, and on
Roscoe's recommendation he kindly admitted the eager student gratis to
his dissecting-room. Gibson dissected there with a will in all his spare
moments, and as he put his mind into the work he soon became well versed
in the construction of the human body.
From the day that Gibson arrived at man's estate, the great dream of his
life was to go to Rome. For Rome is to art what London is to industry--
the metropolis in its own way of the entire earth. But travelling in
1810 cost a vast deal of money; and the poor Liverpool marble-cutter
(for as yet he was really nothing more) could hardly hope to earn the
immense sum that such an expedition would necessarily cost him. So for
six years more he went on working at Liverpool in his own native
untaught fashion, doing his best to perfect himself, but feeling sadly
the lack of training and competition. One of the last works he executed
while still in Mr. Francis's service was a chimney-piece for Sir John
Gladstone, father of the future premier. Sir John was so pleased with
the execution, that he gave the young workman ten pounds as a present.
But in spite of occasional encouragement like this, Gibson felt himself
at Liverpool, as he says, "chained down by the leg, and panting for
liberation."
In 1817, when he was just twenty-seven, he determined to set off to
London. He took with him good introductions from Mr. Roscoe to Mr.
Brougham (afterwards Lord Chancellor), to Christie, the big picture-
dealer, and to several other influential people. Later on, Roscoe
recommended him to still more important leaders in the world of art--
Flaxman the great sculptor, Benjamin West, the Quaker painter and
President of the Royal Academy, and others of like magnitude. Mr. Watson
Taylor, a wealthy art patron, gave Gibson employment, and was anxious
that he should stop in London. But Gibson wanted more than employment;
he wanted to _learn_, to perfect himself, to become great in his
art. He could do that nowhere but at Rome, and to Rome therefore he was
determined to go. Mr. Taylor still begged him to wait a little. "Go to
Rome I will," Gibson answered boldly, "even if I have to go there on
foot."
He was not quite reduced to this heroic measure, however, for his
Liverpool friends made up a purse of L150 for him (we may be sure it was
repaid later on); and with that comparatively large sum in his pocket
the young stone-cutter started off gaily on his continental tour, from
which he was not to return for twenty-seven years. He drove from Paris
to Rome, sharing a carriage with a Scotch gentleman; and when he arrived
in the Pope's city (as it then was) he knew absolutely not a single word
of Italian, or of any other language on earth save Welsh and English. In
those days, Canova, the great Venetian sculptor, was the head of
artistic society in Rome; and as _all_ society in Rome is more or
less artistic, he might almost be said to have led the whole life of the
great and lively city. Indeed, the position of such a man in Italy
resembles far more that of a duke in England than of an artist as we
here are accustomed to think of him. Gibson had letters of introduction
to this prince of sculptors from his London friends; and when he went to
present them, he found Canova in his studio, surrounded by his numerous
scholars and admirers. The Liverpool stone-cutter had brought a few of
his drawings with him, and Canova examined them with great attention.
Instinctively he recognized the touch of genius. When he had looked at
them keenly for a few minutes, he turned kindly to the trembling young
man, and said at once, "Come to me alone next week, for I want to have a
talk with you."
On the appointed day, Gibson, quivering with excitement, presented
himself once more at the great master's studio. Canova was surrounded as
before by artists and visitors; but in a short time he took Gibson into
a room by himself, and began to speak with him in his very broken
English. Many artists came to Rome, he said, with very small means, and
that perhaps might be Gibson's case. "Let me have the gratification,
then," he went on, "of assisting you to prosecute your studies. I am
rich. I am anxious to be of use to you. Let me forward you in your art
as long as you stay in Rome."
Gibson replied, with many stammerings, that he hoped his slender means
would suffice for his personal needs, but that if Canova would only
condescend to give him instruction, to make him his pupil, to let him
model in his studio, he would be eternally grateful. Canova was one of
the most noble and lovable of men. He acceded at once to Gibson's
request, and Gibson never forgot his kind and fatherly assistance. "Dear
generous master," the Welsh sculptor wrote many years after, when Canova
had long passed away, "I see you before me now. I hear your soft
Venetian dialect, and your kindly words inspiring my efforts and gently
correcting my defects. My heart still swells with grateful recollection
of you."
Canova told his new pupil to devote a few days first to seeing the
sights of Rome; but Gibson was impatient to begin at once. "I shall be
at your studio to-morrow morning," the ardent Welshman said; and he kept
his word. Canova, pleased with so much earnestness and promptitude, set
him to work forthwith upon a clay model from his own statue of the
Pugilist. Gibson went to the task with a will, moulding the clay as best
he could into shape; but he still knew so little of the technical ways
of regular sculptors that he tried to model this work from the clay
alone, though its pose was such that it could not possibly hold together
without an iron framework. Canova saw his error and smiled, but let him
go on so that he might learn his business by experience. In a day or two
the whole thing, of course, collapsed by its own weight; and then Canova
called in a blacksmith and showed the eager beginner how the mechanical
skeleton was formed with iron bars, and interlacing crosses of wood and
wire. This was quite a new idea to Gibson, who had modelled hitherto
only in his own self-taught fashion with moist clay, letting it support
its own weight as best it might. Another pupil then fleshed out the iron
skeleton with clay, and roughly shaped it to the required figure, so
that it stood as firm as a rock for Gibson to work upon. The new hand
turned to vigorously once more; and, in spite of his seeming rawness,
finished the copy so well that Canova admitted him at once to the
Academy to model from life. At this Academy Canova himself, who loved
art far more than money, used to attend twice a week to give instruction
to students without receiving any remuneration whatsoever. It is of such
noble men as this that the world of art is largely made up--that world
which we too-practical English have always undervalued or even despised.
Gibson's student period at Rome under Canova was a very happy episode in
a uniformly happy and beautiful life. His only trouble was that he had
not been able to come there earlier. Singularly free from every taint of
envy (like all the great sculptors of his time), he could not help
regretting when he saw other men turning out work of such great
excellence while he was still only a learner. "When I observed the power
and experience of youths much younger than myself," he says in his
generous appreciative fashion, "their masterly manner of sketching in
the figure, and their excellent imitation of nature, my spirits fell
many degrees, and I felt humbled and unhappy." He need not have done so,
for the man who thus distrusts his own work is always the truest
workman; it is only fools or poor creatures who are pleased and self-
satisfied with their own first bungling efforts. But the great enjoyment
of Rome to Gibson consisted in the free artistic society which he found
there. At Liverpool, he had felt almost isolated; there was hardly
anybody with whom he could talk on an equality about his artistic
interests; nobody but himself cared about the things that pleased and
engrossed his earnest soul the most. But at Rome, there was a great
society of artists; every man's studio was open to his friends and
fellow-workers; and a lively running fire of criticism went on
everywhere about all new works completed or in progress. He was
fortunate, too, in the exact moment of his residence: Rome then
contained at once, besides himself, the two truest sculptors of the
present century, Canova the Venetian, and Thorwaldsen the Dane. Both
these great masters were singularly free from jealousy, rivalry, or
vanity. In their perfect disinterestedness and simplicity of character
they closely resembled Gibson himself. The ardent and pure-minded young
Welshman, who kept himself so unspotted from the world in his utter
devotion to his chosen art, could not fail to derive an elevated
happiness from his daily intercourse with these two noble and
sympathetic souls.
After Gibson had been for some time in Canova's studio, his illustrious
master told him that the sooner he took to modelling a life-size figure
of his own invention, the better. So Gibson hired a studio (with what
means he does not tell us in his short sketch of his own life) close to
Canova's, so that the great Venetian was able to drop in from time to
time and assist him with his criticism and judgment. How delightful is
the friendly communion of work implied in all this graceful artistic
Roman life! How different from the keen competition and jealous rivalry
which too often distinguishes our busy money-getting English existence!
In 1819, two years after Gibson's arrival at Rome, he began to model his
Mars and Cupid, a more than life-size group, on which he worked
patiently and lovingly for many months. When it was nearly finished, one
day a knock came at the studio door. After the knock, a handsome young
man entered, and announced himself brusquely as the Duke of Devonshire.
"Canova sent me," he said, "to see what you were doing." Gibson wasn't
much accustomed to dukes in those days--he grew more familiar with them
later on--and we may be sure the poor young artist's heart beat a little
more fiercely than usual when the stranger asked him the price of his
Mars and Cupid in marble. The sculptor had never yet sold a statue, and
didn't know how much he ought to ask; but after a few minutes'
consideration he said, "Five hundred pounds. But, perhaps," he added
timidly, "I have said too much." "Oh no," the duke answered, "not at all
too much;" and he forthwith ordered (or, as sculptors prefer to say,
commissioned) the statue to be executed for him in marble. Gibson was
delighted, and ran over at once to tell Canova, thinking he had done a
splendid stroke of business. Canova shared his pleasure, till the young
man came to the price; then the older sculptor's face fell ominously.
"Five hundred pounds!" he cried in dismay; "why, it won't cover the cost
of marble and workmanship." And so indeed it turned out; for when the
work was finished, it had stood Gibson in L520 for marble and expenses,
and left him twenty pounds out of pocket in the end. So he got less than
nothing after all for his many months of thought and labour over clay
and marble alike.
Discouraging as this beginning must have proved, it was nevertheless in
reality the first important step in a splendid and successful career. It
is something to have sold your first statue, even if you sell it at a
disadvantage. In 1821 Gibson modelled a group of Pysche and the Zephyrs.
That winter Sir George Beaumont, himself a distinguished amateur artist,
and a great patron of art, came to Rome; and Canova sent him to see the
young Welshman's new composition. Sir George asked the price, and
Gibson, this time more cautious, asked for time to prepare an estimate,
and finally named L700. To his joy, Sir George immediately ordered it,
and also introduced many wealthy connoisseurs to the rising sculptor's
studio. That same winter, also, the Duke of Devonshire came again, and
commissioned a bas-relief in marble (which is now at Chatsworth House,
with many other of Gibson's works), at a paying price, too, which was a
great point for the young man's scanty exchequer.
Unfortunately, Gibson has not left us any notice of how he managed to
make both ends meet during this long adult student period at Rome.
Information on that point would indeed be very interesting; but so
absorbed was the eager Welshman always in his art, that he seldom tells
us anything at all about such mere practical every-day matters as bread
and butter. To say the truth, he cared but little about them. Probably
he had lived in a very simple penurious style during his whole
studenthood, taking his meals at a _caffe_ or eating-house, and
centering all his affection and ideas upon his beloved studio. But now
wealth and fame began to crowd in upon him, almost without the seeking.
Visitors to Rome began to frequent the Welshman's rooms, and the death
of "the great and good Canova," which occurred in 1822, while depriving
Gibson of a dearly loved friend, left him, as it were, that great
master's successor. Towards him and Thorwaldsen, indeed, Gibson always
cherished a most filial regard. "May I not be proud," he writes long
after, "to have known such men, to have conversed with them, watched all
their proceedings, heard all their great sentiments on art? Is it not a
pleasure to be so deeply in their debt for instruction?" And now the
flood of visitors who used to flock to Canova's studio began to transfer
their interest to Gibson's. Commission after commission was offered him,
and he began to make money faster than he could use it. His life had
always been simple and frugal--the life of a working man with high aims
and grand ideals: he hardly knew now how to alter it. People who did not
understand Gibson used to say in his later days that he loved money,
because he made much and spent little. Those who knew him better say
rather that he worked much for the love of art, and couldn't find much
to do with his money when he had earned it. He was singularly
indifferent to gain; he cared not what he eat or drank; he spent little
on clothes, and nothing on entertainments; but he paid his workmen
liberally or even lavishly; he allowed one of his brothers more than he
ever spent upon himself, and he treated the other with uniform kindness
and generosity. The fact is, Gibson didn't understand money, and when it
poured in upon him in large sums, he simply left it in the hands of
friends, who paid him a very small percentage on it, and whom he always
regarded as being very kind to take care of the troublesome stuff on his
account. In matters of art, Gibson was a great master; in matters of
business, he was hardly more than a simple-minded child.
Sometimes queer incidents occurred at Gibson's studio from the curious
ignorance of our countrymen generally on the subject of art. One day, a
distinguished and wealthy Welsh gentleman called on the sculptor, and
said that, as a fellow Welshman, he was anxious to give him a
commission. As he spoke, he cast an admiring eye on Gibson's group of
Psyche borne by the Winds. Gibson was pleased with his admiration, but
rather taken aback when the old gentleman said blandly, "If you were to
take away the Psyche and put a dial in the place, it'd make a capital
design for a clock." Much later, the first Duke of Wellington called
upon him at Rome and ordered a statue of Pandora, in an attitude which
he described. Gibson at once saw that the Duke's idea was a bad one, and
told him so. By-and-by, on a visit to England, Gibson waited on the
duke, and submitted photographs of the work he had modelled. "But, Mr.
Gibson," said the old soldier, looking at them curiously, "you haven't
followed my idea." "No," answered the sculptor, "I have followed _my
own_." "You are very stubborn," said Wellington. "Duke," answered the
sturdy sculptor, "I am a Welshman, and all the world knows that we are a
stubborn race." The Iron Duke ought to have been delighted to find
another man as unbending as himself, but he wasn't; and in the end he
refused the figure, which Gibson sold instead to Lady Marian Alford.
For twenty-seven years Gibson remained at Rome, working assiduously at
his art, and rising gradually but surely to the very first place among
then living sculptors. His studio now became the great centre of all
fashionable visitors to Rome. Still, he made no effort to get rich,
though he got rich without wishing it; he worked on merely for art's
sake, not for money. He would not do as many sculptors do, keep several
copies in marble of his more popular statues for sale; he preferred to
devote all his time to new works. "Gibson was always absorbed in one
subject," says Lady Eastlake, "and that was the particular work or part
of a work--were it but the turn of a corner of drapery--which was then
under his modelling hands. Time was nothing to him; he was long and
fastidious." His favourite pupil, Miss Hosmer, once expressed regret to
him that she had been so long about a piece of work on which she was
engaged. "Always try to do the best you can," Gibson answered. "Never
mind how long you are upon a work--no. No one will ask how long you have
been, except fools. You don't care what fools think."
During his long life at Rome, he was much cheered by the presence and
assistance of his younger brother, Mr. Ben, as he always called him, who
was also a sculptor, though of far less merit than John Gibson himself.
Mr. Ben came to Rome younger than John, and he learned to be a great
classical scholar, and to read those Greek and Latin books which John
only knew at second hand, but from whose beautiful fanciful stories of
gods and heroes he derived all the subjects for his works of statuary.
His other brother, Solomon, a strange, wild, odd man, in whom the family
genius had degenerated into mere eccentricity, never did anything for
his own livelihood, but lived always upon John Gibson's generous bounty.
In John's wealthy days, he and Mr. Ben used to escape every summer from
the heat and dust of Rome--which is unendurable in July and August--to
the delightfully cool air and magnificent mountain scenery of the Tyrol.
"I cannot tell you how well I am," he writes on one of these charming
visits, "and so is Mr. Ben. Every morning we take our walks in the woods
here. I feel as if I were new modelled." Another passage in one of these
summer tourist letters well deserves to be copied here, as it shows the
artist's point of view of labours like Telford's and Stephenson's. "From
Bormio," he says, "the famous road begins which passes over the Stelvio
into the Tyrol; the highest carriage-road in the world. We began the
ascent early in the morning. It is magnificent and wonderful. Man shows
his talents, his power over great difficulties, in the construction of
these roads. Behold the cunning little workman--he comes, he explores,
and he says, 'Yes, I will send a carriage and horses over these mighty
mountains;' and, by Jove, you are drawn up among the eternal snows. I am
a great admirer of these roads."
In 1844 Gibson paid his first visit to England, a very different England
indeed to the one he had left twenty-seven years earlier. His Liverpool
friends, now thoroughly proud of their stone-cutter, insisted upon
giving him a public banquet. Glasgow followed the same example; and the
simple-minded sculptor, unaccustomed to such honours, hardly knew how to
bear his blushes decorously upon him. During this visit, he received a
command to execute a statue of the queen. Gibson was at first quite
disconcerted at such an awful summons. "I don't know how to behave to
queens," he said. "Treat her like a lady," said a friend; and Gibson,
following the advice, found it sufficiently answered all the necessities
of the situation. But when he went to arrange with the Prince Consort
about the statue, he was rather puzzled what he should do about
measuring the face, which he always did for portrait sculpture with a
pair of compasses. All these difficulties were at last smoothed over;
and Gibson was also permitted to drape the queen's statue in Greek
costume, for in his artistic conscientiousness he absolutely refused to
degrade sculpture by representing women in the fashionable gown of the
day, or men in swallow-tail coats and high collars.
Another work which Gibson designed during this visit possesses for us a
singular and exceptional interest. It was a statue of George Stephenson,
to be erected at Liverpool. Thus, by a curious coincidence, the
Liverpool stone-cutter was set to immortalize the features and figure of
the Killingworth engine-man. Did those two great men, as they sat
together in one room, sculptor and sitter, know one another's early
history and strange struggles, we wonder? Perhaps not; but if they did,
it must surely have made a bond of union between them. At any rate,
Gibson greatly admired Stephenson, just as he had admired the Stelvio
road. "I will endeavour to give him a look capable of action and
energy," he said; "but he must be contemplative, grave, simple. He is a
good subject. I wish to make him look like an Archimedes."
If Gibson admired Stephenson, however, he did not wholly admire
Stephenson's railways. The England he had left was the England of mail-
coaches. In Italy, he had learnt to travel by carriage, after the
fashion of the country; but these new whizzing locomotives, with their
time-tables, and their precision, and their inscrutable mysteries of
shunts and junctions, were quite too much for his simple, childish, old-
world habits. He had a knack of getting out too soon or too late, which
often led him into great confusion. Once, when he wanted to go to
Chichester, he found himself landed at Portsmouth, and only discovered
his mistake when, on asking the way to the cathedral, he was told there
was no cathedral in the town at all. Another story of how he tried to
reach Wentworth, Lord Fitzwilliam's place, is best told in his own
words. "The train soon stopped at a small station, and, seeing some
people get out, I also descended; when, in a moment, the train moved on
--faster and faster--and left me standing on the platform. I walked a few
paces backward and forward in disagreeable meditation. 'I wish to
Heaven,' thought I to myself, 'that I was on my way back to Rome with a
postboy.' Then I observed a policeman darting his eyes upon me, as if he
would look me through. Said I to the fellow, 'Where is that cursed train
gone to? It's off with my luggage and here am I.' The man asked me the
name of the place where I took my ticket. 'I don't remember,' said I.
'How should I know the name of any of these places?--it's as long as my
arm. I've got it written down somewhere.' 'Pray, sir,' said the man,
after a little pause, 'are you a foreigner?' 'No,' I replied, 'I am not
a foreigner; I'm a sculptor.'"
The consequence of this almost childish carelessness was that Gibson had
always to be accompanied on his long journeys either by a friend or a
courier. While Mr. Ben lived, he usually took his brother in charge to
some extent; and the relation between them was mutual, for while John
Gibson found the sculpture, Mr. Ben found the learning, so that Gibson
used often to call him "my classical dictionary." In 1847, however, Mr.
Ben was taken ill. He got a bad cold, and would have no doctor, take no
medicine. "I consider Mr. Ben," his brother writes, "as one of the most
amiable of human beings--too good for this world--but he will take no
care against colds, and when ill he is a stubborn animal." That summer
Gibson went again to England, and when he came back found Mr. Ben no
better. For four years the younger brother lingered on, and in 1851 died
suddenly from the effects of a fall in walking. Gibson was thus left
quite alone, but for his pupil Miss Hosmer, who became to him more than
a daughter.
During his later years Gibson took largely to tinting his statues--
colouring them faintly with flesh-tones and other hues like nature; and
this practice he advocated with all the strength of his single-minded
nature. All visitors to the great Exhibition of 1862 will remember his
beautiful tinted Venus, which occupied the place of honour in a light
temple erected for the purpose by another distinguished artistic
Welshman, Mr. Owen Jones, who did much towards raising the standard of
taste in the English people.
In January, 1866, John Gibson had a stroke of paralysis, from which he
never recovered. He died within the month, and was buried in the English
cemetery at Rome. Both his brothers had died before him; and he left the
whole of his considerable fortune to the Royal Academy in England. An
immense number of his works are in the possession of the Academy, and
are on view there throughout the year.
John Gibson's life is very different in many respects from that of most
other great working men whose story is told in this volume. Undoubtedly,
he was deficient in several of those rugged and stern qualities to which
English working men have oftenest owed their final success. But there
was in him a simple grandeur of character, a purity of soul, and an
earnestness of aim which raised him at once far above the heads of most
among those who would have been the readiest to laugh at and ridicule
him. Besides his exquisite taste, his severe love of beauty, and his
marvellous power of expressing the highest ideals of pure form, he had
one thing which linked him to all the other great men whose lives we
have here recounted--his steadfast and unconquerable personal energy. In
one sense it may be said that he was not a practical man; and yet in
another and higher sense, what could possibly be more practical than
this accomplished resolve of the poor Liverpool stone-cutter to overcome
all obstacles, to go to Rome, and to make himself into a great sculptor?
It is indeed a pity that in writing for Englishmen of the present day
such a life should even seem for a moment to stand in need of a
practical apology. For purity, for guilelessness, for exquisite
appreciation of the true purpose of sculpture as the highest embodiment
of beauty of form, John Gibson's art stands unsurpassed in all the
annals of modern statuary.
