He made the statue of Mme. de Staël; one of Talma for the Théâtre Français; the colossal statue of King René at Aix; monument to Fénelon at Cambray; the statue of the great Condé at Versailles; the Gutenberg memorial at Strasburg, which is one of his most successful works, and a large number of other sculptures.
His chief characteristic is realism, and he carried this so far that it frequently became coarseness. David designed the relief for the pediment of the Pantheon. The inscription on the building declares that it is dedicated by a grateful country to its great men, and the sculptor seems to have had this in mind, for he represented in his group a figure of France surrounded by those who had been great in its times of war and days of peace. It is too realistic to be pleasing, and is far less creditable to the sculptor than are many of his less prominent works.
If little can be said of the modern French sculpture prior to our immediate time, there is still less to be told of that of England. There are many public monuments there, but they do not show forth any high artistic genius or rise above the commonplace except in very rare instances. There is but one English sculptor of whom I shall speak. John Gibson (1791-1866) was born near Conway, in Wales. When he was nine years old his parents went to Liverpool with the intention of sailing for America; but they gave up the idea, and the boy was sent to school in Liverpool. Before this he had been in the habit of drawing and of making sketches of anything that he saw and was pleased with; he now studied the prints in the shop windows, and made pictures, which he sold to his fellow-pupils. He attracted the attention of a print-seller, who was so interested in him that he allowed him to draw from studies and casts from the antique which he had. When fourteen years old the boy was apprenticed to a cabinet-maker, but after a year he persuaded his employer to allow him to leave his shop, and was then apprenticed to a wood-carver. He did not stop at this, however, for when he became acquainted with the Messrs. Francis, who had a marble-yard, he persuaded his second master to release him, and was apprenticed for the third time, and in this case to the occupation which he had determined should be that of his life.
He was now very happy, and his improvement in drawing, modelling, and working in marble was very rapid. After a few months he made the acquaintance of William Roscoe, who became his friend and patron. He remained in Liverpool until he was twenty-seven years old; he had improved every advantage within his reach, but he was very desirous of travelling. In 1817, armed with a few letters of introduction, he went to London, where he obtained several orders, and in October of that year went to Rome.
He had a letter to Canova, who took him under his care and gave him admission to the classes in the Academy, in which he could draw from living models. In 1819 he received his first important commission; it was from the Duke of Devonshire for a group of Mars and Cupid. From this time he advanced steadily in his profession, and was always busy. He lived twenty-seven years in Rome, and passed his summers in Innsbrück.
In 1844 he went to Liverpool to oversee the erection of his statue of Mr. Huskisson; he was received with enthusiasm, and when he went to Glasgow to superintend the placing of his statue of Mr. Finlay in the Merchants' Hall his reception was even more flattering, as it was given him simply as an artist, and not connected with any former associations, as in Liverpool. During this visit to England Gibson was summoned to Windsor to make a statue of Queen Victoria, which he completed after his return to Rome. The queen was represented in a classical costume, and the diadem, sandals, and borders of the drapery were colored. This was very much criticised and much was written and said about it; Gibson took little notice of all this, and simply answered it by saying, "Whatever the Greeks did was right."
In 1851 Gibson sustained a great loss in the death of his brother Ben, who had lived with him in Rome for fourteen years. Five years later, when in perfect health, the sculptor was attacked by paralysis, and lived but a short time. He was buried in the English cemetery at Rome, and Lord Lytton wrote the inscription upon his monument. It says: "His native genius strengthened by careful study, he infused the spirit of Grecian art into masterpieces all his own. His character as a man was in unison with his attributes as an artist—beautiful in its simplicity and truthfulness, noble in its dignity and elevation." A monument was also raised to Gibson in the church at Conway.
The master left the models of all his works and the larger part of his fortune to the Royal Academy in London. Among his works are Mars and Cupid, at Chatsworth; Psyche borne by Zephyrs, in the Palazzo Torlonia, at Rome, and a replica at St. Petersburg; Hylas surprised by Nymphs, in the National Gallery, London; Sleeping Shepherd Boy, in the Lenox collection in New York; Cupid disguised as a Shepherd, which he often repeated; portraits of Queen Victoria, at Buckingham Palace and Osborne; Sir Robert Peel, in Westminster Abbey; George Stephenson, in St. George's Hall, Liverpool; eighteen portrait busts; sixteen bas-reliefs of ideal subjects and sixteen others for monuments to the dead. A large part of these are in the chapel of the Liverpool Cemetery. He modelled a bas-relief of Christ blessing little children.
Gibson found his entire happiness in his art. In his own words, he worked on "happily and with ever new pleasure, avoiding evil and with a calm soul, making images, not for worship, but for the love of the beautiful. The beautiful elevates us above the crowd in this world; the ideal, higher—yes, higher still, to celestial beauty, the fountain of all. Socrates said that outward beauty was the sign of the inward; in the life of a man, as in an image, every part should be beautiful."
He was never elated by praise; he was glad of tributes which proved that he was respected, but he received all honors with a simplicity of self-respect which spoke the sincere nobility of his nature.