To all who are commencing the struggle of life the moral course of Canova demands equally close imitation, with his persevering zeal in the attainment of artistic excellence. He ever refused pecuniary dependence; subjected himself to great disadvantages in carrying out his designs, rather than submit to such dependence; and when a pension of three thousand crowns was conferred upon him, towards the close of his career, he refused to apply any portion of it to his own gratification of a personal kind, and systematically devoted it, yearly, to premiums for young competitors in art, instruction of scholars in painting and sculpture, and pensions for poor and decayed artists. Young reader, let the words of Canova, on his death-bed, sink deeply into your mind, that they may actuate your whole life as fully and nobly as they actuated his own:—“First of all we ought to do our own duty; but—first of all!”
CHANTREY,
The most eminent of our sculptors, was another noble example of successful perseverance. From a boy, accustomed to drive an ass laden with sand into Sheffield, he rose to the highest honours of an exalted profession; a large proportion of the persons of rank and distinction in his own time sat to him for busts and statues: he was knighted, and, like Canova, left considerable wealth at his death, to be devoted through future time to the encouragement of Art. His father, who was a small farmer in the neighbourhood of Sheffield, wished to place him with a grocer or an attorney; but, at his own urgent desire, he was apprenticed with a carver and gilder in that town. An engraver and portrait-painter, perceiving his devotion to Art, gave him some valuable instruction; but his master did not incline to forward his favourite pursuits, fearing they would interfere with his duties as an apprentice. Young Chantrey, however, resolved not to be defeated in his aims, and hired a room for a few pence a week, secretly making it his studio. His apprenticeship to the carver and gilder having expired, he advertised in Sheffield to take portraits in crayons; and two years afterwards announced that he had commenced taking models from the life. Like Canova, but untaught, he began to model in clay when a child; and, at two-and-twenty, he thus began to realise his early bent. Yet patronage was but scanty at Sheffield, and he successively visited Dublin, Edinburgh, and London, working as a modeller in clay. But neither in these larger arenas of merit did he immediately succeed according to his wish. Returning to Sheffield, he modelled four busts of well-known characters there as large as life, one of them being the likeness of the lately-deceased vicar. This was a performance of such excellence that he was offered a commission, by a number of the deceased clergyman’s friends, to execute a monument to the same reverend personage for the parish church. Chantrey had never yet lifted chisel to marble; and it, therefore, required all the courage which consciousness of genius alone could give to undertake such a task. It was the great turning point of his life. He accepted the commission, employed a marble mason to rough-hew the block, set about the completion himself, and finished it most successfully. Thenceforward his course was open to the excellence he displayed in giving life-like expression to historic portraits, as in his marble statue of Watt in Westminster Abbey, and his bronze statue of Pitt in Hanover Square; and, above all, in infusing poetry into marble, as in his exquisite sculpture of the Lady Louisa Russell at Woburn Abbey, and his unsurpassed group, “the Sleeping Children,” in Lichfield cathedral.
In the lives of the great Michael Angelo himself, of Benvenuto Cellini, and others, may also be found inspiring records of the tameless and tireless energy which has secured to us many of the great triumphs of sculpture. Our limits demand that we devote the remainder of a brief chapter to a glance at the struggles of painters.
SALVATOR ROSA,
