John Flaxman - Early Life

Early Life

He was born in York. His father was also named John, after an ancestor who, according to family tradition, had fought for Parliament at the Battle of Naseby, and afterwards settled as a carrier or farmer in Buckinghamshire. John Flaxman the father was well known as 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 Lee, and John was their second son. Within six months of his birth the family returned to London. He was a sickly child, and his figure was high-shouldered, his head too large for his body. His mother died when he was nine, and his father re-married. He had little schooling, and was largely self-educated. He took delight in drawing and modelling from his father's stock-in-trade, and studied translations from classic literature in an effort to understand them.

Customers of his father took a fancy to the child, and helped him with books, advice, and later with commissions. Particular admirers from his youth were the painter George Romney, and a cultivated clergyman, Anthony Stephen Mathew and his wife Mrs. Mathew, in whose house in Rathbone Place the young Flaxman used to meet the best "blue-stocking" society of the day and, among associates of his own age, the artists William Blake and Thomas Stothard, who became his closest friends. He had already begun to work in clay as well as in pencil. At 12 years of age he won the first prize of the Society of Arts for a medallion, and became a public exhibitor in the gallery of the Free Society of Artists; at 15 he won a second prize from the Society of Arts and began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. In the same year, 1770, he entered as an Academy student and won the silver medal. Not all of his artistic endeavours resulted in success however. In the competition for the gold medal of the Academy in 1772, Flaxman was defeated, the prize being awarded by the president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, to a competitor named Engleheart. Rather than being a discouragement, this episode seemed to help cure Flaxman of a tendency to conceit, about which Thomas Wedgwood said of him in 1775, "It is but a few years since he was a most supreme coxcomb."

He continued to work diligently, both as a student and as an exhibitor at the Academy, with occasional attempts at 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, an historical figure (1772); a figure of Comedy; and a relief of a Vestal (1773). During this period he received a commission from a friend of the Mathew family for a statue of Alexander the Great, but he was unable to obtain a regular income from private contracts. When he was 19 years old he was employed by Josiah Wedgwood and his partner Bentley, as a modeller of classic and domestic friezes, plaques, ornamental vessels and medallion portraits. It was in these inventive "jasper" and "basalt" ware compositions that the manufacturers of the age, who had conceived and perfected the style, earned their great reputation.

In the same year, 1775, John Flaxman the elder moved from New Street to a bigger house at no. 420 the Strand. For 12 years Flaxman junior lived chiefly by his work for the Wedgwood company. The beauty of the product is undeniable, and the skills which Flaxman acquired in the delicacies of modelling in low relief and on a minute scale were invaluable. By 1780 Flaxman had also begun to earn money by sculpting grave monuments. His early memorial work included monuments for Thomas Chatterton in the church of St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol (1780), Mrs Morley in Gloucester Cathedral (1784), and the Rev. T and Mrs Margaret Ball in Chichester Cathedral (1785). During the rest of Flaxman's career memorial bas-reliefs of this type made up the bulk of his output; and may be found in many churches throughout England. One example, the monument to George Steevens originally in St Matthais Old Church, is now to be found in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. His best monumental work is admired for its pathos and simplicity, and for the alliance of a truly Greek instinct for rhythmical design and composition with the spirit of domestic tenderness and innocence that is one of the secrets of the modern soul.