1 JANUARY 1870, Page 25

BOOKS.

MR. GIBSON THE SCULPTOR"

Tins is a very pleasant little book,—founded in some measure on autobiographical materials left behind hint by Mr. Gibson, — materials which we rather wish that Lady Eastlake had given us without omissions, and especially without the omission,—really hardly pardonable,—to which she confesses at p. 76, where Gibson had narrated some fanciful interview with the god of earthly love, on which he founded one of his most successful works, " Cupid caressing a butterfly on his breast, while with his right hand he is drawing forth an arrow to pierce it." "Gibson," says Lady Eastlake, "was fully persuaded that the little god appeared bodily to him on this occasion, and has left a description of the interview which draws too much upon the marvellous for insertion here. The gist of their conversation, however, was that the god of Love directed the sculptor to colour his statue." Now, that we call a most unfair want of confidence in the reader of Gibson's quaint and naïf autobiography. What matters it whether it" draws on the marvellous" or not? The reader can judge of the true interpretation to be put on this fanciful vagary of Gibson's &swell as the editor. In reading the account given by a man of genius of his own career, his extravagances and wilder fancies are at least as interesting to any thinking man as his graver reflections. They illustrate his genius, and often give the key to his peculiar successes. What we completely fail to gather from this little memoir is the mo- tive-power of Gibson's personal fancy and imagination. His absolute devotion to Greek subjects and Greek models makes it clear that he was not, as even Lady Eastlake and his greatest admirers • Life of John Moon, R.A, Sculptor. Edited by Lady Eastlake. London : Long- units. 1869.

admit, a sculptor "of great originality of invention," and yet that he had a vast amount of poetic feeling for beauty of conception as well as beauty of execution is equally clear. What we want to know more of, is the secret of his personal idealism, as we may call it, the points in the Greek mythology which really fascinated so intensely a mind so full of energy and ifimplicity, and persuaded it that a constant contemplation and reproduction of the legendary stories of Greek literature in our modern art elevate and refine' the soul, as he so constantly repeats to us. The funniest extravagance which could throw a light on this profound and to our minds somewhat unintelligible conviction of Gibson's would add greatly to the value of the memoir, and in any case the wildest eccentricity of a man of genius has a right to be recorded, if he himself is willing to impart it to the world. We owe some grudge to Lady Eastlake, in spite of the pleasure we have derived from this little book, for suppressing Gibson's freak of fancy, or whatever it might be, especially as there is really more of original conception in the particular design of Gibson's, in relation to which he cherished this strange idea, than in almost any other of his works.

John Gibson, born near Conway in 1790, was the son of a poor Welsh market-gardener, and seems, as is so often the case with men of genius, to have owed much of his force of character to his mother. She was "passionate and strong-minded," ruled his father always, and continued to govern all the family as long as she lived. Ilis father intended to emigrate to America, and went to Liverpool for that purpose ; but his mother, on seeing the ships in the Mersey, was seized with horror of the voyage, and obliged him to give up the notion. She imprinted on her children's mind the profoundest love for honesty and sincerity, having birched Gibson publicly in the street for stealing a cake when he was quite a child from the woman who sold cakes at the corner of a Conway street. It was she, too, who fostered his genius. He began very early by drawing a line of geese sailing on a pond from nature, for which his mother praised him, making him repeat the effort till he became more perfect, and then exchange the subject for something else. She was also an interpreter of flreams, and interpreted a pretty intelligible dream of her son's when a young man into a prophecy that he would surmount all difficulties in the way of his going to Rome, there to study his favourite art. It seems pretty certain that he gained from his mother both the simplicity and ardour of his character and what- ever of the mystical there was in his love of art. Gibson's account of his childhood and youth is very fascinating. He tells us with much simple humour of his first commission as an artist :—

"In the course of time I began to sell my drawings to the boys at school, which enabled one to purchase paper and colours. I made no profit, for my prices were small. There was a very amiable boy who was fond of me, and who was so amiable as always to admire my draw- ings. His father had presented him with a new prayer-book, beautifully bound ; this gift, with sixpence from his mother, was for good conduct at school. The boy said to me, 'Gibson, you know how much I like your drawings ; if you will make me one, in colours, for the new prayer-book, I will give you the sixpence.' At that time there was a fine print of Napoleon crossing the Alps, from David's picture, in one of the shop windows, which I had already copied in my peculiar way. I showed my copy to my patron ; he was charmed, and commissioned me to repeat the subject as a frontispiece to his prayer-book ? It was executed in bright colours, and he paid one the sixpence,—the largest sum I had yet received for a work of art."

A curious instance of the peculiar type of that 'Welsh obstinacy for which he took credit in later life, when insisting on carrying out his own views to the disgust sometimes of his patrons, is given in his mode of compelling his first masters, certain Liverpool cabinet- makers, for whom he had done a good deal of clever wood-carving, to surrender his indentures directly he learned the far greater Attractions of sculpture in stone and marble :—

" As Mr. Francis praised this attempt, the idea came into my mind to try and induce him to purchase my indenture from the cabinet- makers, and to serve the remainder of my seven years in the practice of sculpture. But my cabinot-makers refused to part with me on any terms ; I was, they said, the most industrious lad they over had ; they oven refused an offer of seventy pounds from the Messrs. Francis to give me up. I then fell upon a plan of emancipating myself. I con- tinued to attend regularly at the working hours, but I did no work. They remonstrated with me in vain — praised my former industry, appealed to my gratitude for kindness ; reminded me that they had often made one presents. I admitted that it was all true. They then told me that an apprentice might be imprisoned for neglecting his duty. I admitted that too. But my mind was made up—a sculptor and not a cabinet-maker I would be. 'I will fight for it,' said I to myself, and rather serve the remaining years in prison than continue at this disgusting wood-carving.' Several days elapsed, and I kept up the fight, doing scarcely any work, though always regularly at my post. At length my master flow into a passion, called me an ungrateful scoundrel, and gave me a blow on the side of my head. It was with his open hand—not violently. I kept myself calm, and said with quiet determination, am quite prepared to go before the magistrate ; I have

nothing to say in my defence ; I have made up my mind to stay in prison—yes—for years.' With so inflexible a martyr there was nothing to be done. At length the cabinet-makers were persuaded to accept the seventy pounds, and the happy day arrived when I found myself entered as an apprentice for sculpture to the Messrs. Francis."

The same kind of peculiarly Welsh obstinacy,—the passive and economic obstinacy which is carefully frugal of its means, and opposes as much resistance as is necessary for its purpose, but absolutely no more,—Gibson used to display in later years. When a patron ordered one of his works in marble, especially prohibiting him from colouring it, Gibson, without saying a word of his purpose, calmly coloured it, or otherwise worked out his own con-

ception, and this without a hint to the buyer that the sculptor had not the slightest notion of adopting the suggestions to which he

had silently listened. Any obstinacy, not Welsh, of equal force of purpose would have broken free from such trammels as the cabinet-makers, or from such orders as seemed to him to limit his genius, altogether. But Gibson's obstinacy was not of this nature. He resisted only as much as was absolutely necessary for his own end, and no more at all,—an economy of moral means which was evidently at times even more exasperating to his em- ployers than the more liberal obstinacy which candidly confesses itself from the first.

His first great patron in Liverpool was Mr. Roscoe, the cele- brated philanthropist, the historian of Lorenzo de Medici and Leo X. He first taught Gibson the value of Italian and Greek art, and still better, urged and persuaded him to study anatomy thoroughly, as the first condition of true sculpture. It was to Mr.

Roscoe's advice that he owed his desire and, as the result of his desire, his inflexible purpose to go to study at Rome, as "the great University" of the fine arts,—a purpose which he accomplished at the age of twenty-seven. For the rest of his life—and forty-eight years of study in this great University were granted to him,—he never left Rome except for the summer, and he was the great apostle of the principle .that if England is ever to excel in the arts, she should give, like other countries, studentships to young Art students for the express purpose of studying in Rome, He insisted on the enormous value of the facilities for studying Greek and Italian art in Rome, and not less on the advantage derived from the free co-operation and mutual criticisms of artists of all countries on each other's works,—a co-operation which guards against the danger of provincialism and all sorts of eccen- tricity in art. It might, perhaps, fairly be said that Gibson him- self illustrated not only the advantage but the disadvantage of his own principle, that while gaining infinitely in grace and idealism, he lost all the freshness and flavour of a student of local habits and national character. At the same time, it must be admitted that sculpture is at home in any country almost in inverse proportion to the amount of clothing worn, and that, except as regards mere bust sculptors, both the amount and the kinds of dress proper to Northern nations are singularly unfitted for the growth of a native school of sculpture. What puzzles us in Gibson is not so much his disbelief in any adequate English school of sculpture, as his extraordinary and marked preference of the Greek mythological traditions to all other subjects for his art, as compared, for instance, with either Greek, or Roman, or Oriental historic subjects. He evidently preferred the idealism which has no distinct relation to life, to the idealism which is to be discovered in and drawn out of life, and which will always, therefore, exert a far greater power over human feelings. One might almost say that Gibson's whole life was a life of fancy,—that his intense love of beauty was in some sense a love of the abstract and unreal, so little taste did he show for human subjects, however grand the passions and motives they embodied.

Many of the most charming and playful of Gibson's notes of his own life are contained in letters to the granddaughter of his old patron, Mr. Roscoe, the late Mrs. Henry Sandbach, who made his acquaintance at Rome in 1838. It was for her husband that two of his finest works were executed, the Hunter, and the Aurora,

and it was to her wise advice and genuine enthusiasm for his geld% that we owe the autobiographic reminiscences which make up .c, considerable aportion of Lady Eastlake's book. Lady Eastlake quotes from Mrs. Sandbach's poems an ode on Thorwaldsen's return to Rome

in 1841 with which Gibson delighted the great Danish sculptor. We wonder rather that she has not quoted a sonnet on Gibson's own fine statue of Aurora, not by Mrs. Henry Sandbach, but pre- fixed to the volume from which she quotes, and since published in the remains of her cousin, a man of unquestionable genius, the late Mr. William Caldwell Roscoe. It is somewhat antique in style, as if adapting itself to Gibson's own taste in art, but contains a more perfect rendering of his marble into English verse than we remem- ber ever to have seen achieved in attempts of this kind. Those who know the Aurora will feel some pleasure in reading such a perfect picture of it ; those who do not, will form a better concep- tion of it than any words even of the sculptor's own could give them :— "Grasos's STATUE OF AURORA.

"Fair unto all men, shining Morning, seems Thy face serene when a new day unrolls, And all old sights and long endured doles Seem fresh and bearable in thy bright beams.

But only to the dreamers of sweet dreams,—

The visionary apprehensive souls Whose finer insight no dim sense controls,

Com'st thou in this fair shape o'er Ocean's streams,—

Thy white foot hanging on an eastern wave, And thy swept garments blown by early air, In thy two hands rich urns, powerful to save From darkness and the terror of the grave ; And in thy faco calm victory dost thou wear Over the night, and terror, and despair."

The author of this fine sonnet was, we believe, a personal friend of Gibson's,—though not of course so intimate a friend as his cousin, Mrs. Sandbach, of whose letters to Gibson and personal im- pression of him we regret to say that there is no record in this volume, —and we believe that he chose the true term for describing Gibson's genius when he calls him a "dreamer of sweet dreams." Of what these dreams were we get very little notion, partly because Gibson's defective education seems to have so far limited his powers of expression that his thoughts on art and beauty are apt to betray the baldness and stiffness of a child's themes, and partly perhaps from a childlike sententiousness always belonging to him which suggests that he never came to a full knowledge of himself, and was always more or less of a child so far as the art of self- interpretation went. There is an inexpressible charm about the sententious childlike yes' and 'no' with which he reinforces his own courage after indulging in a quaintly childlike bit of self-will; as here, for instance, on hearing that the English newspapers had abused both him and Mrs. Huskisson for allowing the arm of Huskisson's statue to be bare :—" I am sorry 'the vicious press' has been so coarse with her [Mrs. Huskisson]. As for their attacking my work, it is a proof that it gives them pain. In a professional view I feel as if between two batteries, —one in London, the other here. Yes, I agree with old King David. I say 'curse all my enemies,'—those in London, and those at Rome too. I won't forgive my enemies, it's foolish to do so." Or take this, again, of still quainter and more childlike sententiousness :—

" On a tour in Switzerland, where Miss Homier formed one of the party, she extended her usual care of the master to his luggage as well. That consisted of three pieces, one of which was a hat-box. But Miss Roamer soon observed that this box was never opened, and thus it remained, inviolate, to the end of the journey. Returned to Rome, she ventured to ask what object bad been served by giving the hat-box the tour, and herself the trouble of looking after it. Gibson calmly replied, The Greeks had a great respect for the number three—yes—the Greeks—for the number three,' and that was all the explanation she ever obtained."

On the whole, the best we can make out of this necessarily frag- mentary, though very interesting little book, is that Gibson was to the end of his life a child, and a simple fancy-free child in all those ways in which the maturing of the imagination and its blending with actual life are generally brought about. He seems to have been destitute of what we should call passion and even ambition, and his intense and simple and entirely unworldly desire for eminence in his art seems to have been almost as pure and innocent, and as little prolific of moral struggle or temptation to him, as a child's love of fairy stories. As a sculptor Gibson was eminently a "dreamer of sweet dreams," rather than a student of life. And he turned to the fair mythology of Greece simply perhaps as containing the fairest dreams in which the plastic arts could find full scope at all. His love of repose, of serenity, of tranquillity in art was his most marked characteristic; and this was, we think, the note of a mind to which any insight into the deeper passions and moral struggles of man had been altogether denied.