Flaxman, JOHN, R.A., sculptor, was born at York, 6th July 1755. His father, a moulder of plaster figures, removed to London when his son was six months old; and the delicate, slightly-deformed child, confined to home-pleasures and stimulated by the works of art which surrounded him, soon developed a taste for drawing. Seated in his little chair behind the counter, with his crutches by his side, he attracted the attention of some of his father's customers. The Rev. Mr Mathew found him attempting to teach himself Latin, and forthwith befriended him, introducing him to his cultured and refined home-circle, where his wife read Homer and Virgil to the boy. At the age of ten his health greatly improved, and he devoted himself to art. In 1767 and 1769 he exhibited models at the Free Society of Artists, and in the latter year he was admitted a student of the Royal Academy, whose silver medal he won in 1770, when he began to contribute to its exhibitions. From this period he was constantly engaged upon works of sculpture; but patronage was long of coming, and from 1775 till 1787 his chief source of income was the Messrs Wedgwood, whom he furnished with exquisite designs and decorations for their pottery, work for which he was admirably fitted by his unrivalled skill in modelling in relief. In 1782 he quitted the parental roof, established himself in a small house and studio in Wardour Street, and married Ann Denham, a cultivated and estimable woman, who was his true helpmate for thirty-eight years. He now began to be employed upon monumental sculpture, into which he infused much of pathos and of grace. Among his works of this class may be named his monument to Chatterton, in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol; to Collins, in Chichester Cathedral; to Mrs Morley, in Gloucester Cathedral; and to the memory of Miss Cromwell. By 1787 he had gained enough by his art to warrant a visit to Italy, and, accompanied by his wife, he proceeded to Rome, and studied there for seven years. During this period he executed a group of Cephalus and Aurora; his ill-remunerated group of 'The Fury of Athamas,' from Ovid; and his restoration of the Hercules torso; and began his great series of designs to the Iliad and the Odyssey (published 1793), to Æschylus (1795), and to Dante's Divina Commedia (1797), which were engraved in Rome by Pirolì, under his own supervision, and widely extended his fame. They were followed by his designs to Hesiod, engraved by Blake in 1817. Returning to England in 1794, he occupied himself upon his fine monument to Lord Mansfield, in Westminster Abbey. In 1797 he was elected A.R.A., in 1800 R.A., and in 1810 he became professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy. His lectures, which were collected in a volume in 1829, are judicious and well considered, but somewhat wanting in lightness, point, and charm of style. Among the works of his later life are his monuments to Sir Joshua Reynolds, to Lord Howe, and to Lord Nelson; 'Michael and Satan,' his most important example of ideal sculpture, executed for Lord Egremont; and his drawings and model for his great 'Shield of Achilles,' completed in 1818. He died 7th December 1826, and was buried in the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields, London.
Personally Flaxman was a man of extreme gentleness, modesty, and courtesy; simple and abstemious in his tastes; devout in spirit, a follower of Swedenborg. As an artist he ranks at the very head of English sculptors on account of his inventive power and felicity, and of the purity, grace, and sweetness of his style. Never has the beauty of Greek sculpture found a more perfect embodiment and reutterance in modern work. Occasionally, however, his productions are wanting in force and strength, and he was unequal to the suggestion of strenuous motion, or to the portrayal of the intenser passions. He was more skilful as a modeller than as a sculptor in marble, and more successful in bas-relief than in his treatment of the round. But, indeed, the simple and exquisite grace of his design is often seen most completely in the slighter of his pencil sketches in outline, which, along with his other works, may be studied in the Flaxman Gallery, founded by his wife's sister, his adopted daughter, in University College, London. See Allan Cunningham's Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, vol. iii. (1830); and Professor S. Colvin, The Drawings of Flaxman in Thirty-two Plates, with Descriptions and an Essay on his Life and Genius (fol. 1876).