Liverpool friends made up a purse of 150 pounds 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 520 pounds 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 700 pounds. 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 cafe 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.
IV.
WILLIAM HERSCHEL, BANDSMAN.