“If Miss Hosmer’s works were the productions of other artists and not her own there would be in my studio two impostors—Miss Hosmer and Myself.
“John Gibson, R.A.
“Rome, Nov., 1863.”
Gibson was himself a most interesting person; an old Greek soul, born by haphazard in a Welsh village. He had wonderfully little (for a Welshman) of anything like what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls Hebraism in his composition. There was a story current among us of some one telling him of a bet which had been made that another member of our society could not repeat the Lord’s Prayer; and it was added that the party defied to repeat it had begun (instead of it) with a doggerel American prayer for children:—
“Before I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
“Ah! you see,” said Gibson, “He did know the Lord’s Prayer after all!”
Once he sat by me on the Pincian and said: “You know I don’t often read the Bible, I have my sculpture to attend to. But I have had to look into it for my bas-relief of the Children coming to Christ, and, do you know, I find that Jesus Christ really said a good thing?”
I smothered my laughter, and said: “O certainly, Mr. Gibson, a great many excellent things.” “Yes!” he said in his slow way. “Yes, he did. There were some people called Pharisees who came and asked him troublesome questions. And he said,—he said,—well, I forget exactly what he said, but ‘Deeds not words,’ was what he meant to say.”
The exquisite grace of Gibson’s statues was all a part of the purity and delicacy of his mind. He was in many respects an unique character; a simple-hearted and single-minded worshipper of Beauty; and if my good friend Lady Eastlake had not thought fit to prune his extraordinarily quaint and original Autobiography, (which I have read in the MS.) to ordinary book form and modernised style, I believe it would have been deemed one of the gems of original literature, like Benvenuto Cellini’s, and the renown of Gibson as a great artist would have been kept alive thereby.