John Gibson, Designer: Sculpture and Reproductive Media in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The Welsh-born sculptor John Gibson (1790-1866) was one of the most popular British artists in Rome during the nineteenth century.2 His studio on Via della Fontanella near the Piazza del Popolo was a mandatory stop for visitors on the Grand Tour.3 Ever the classicist, Gibson praised the sculptural achievements of the Greeks, declaring 'Whatever the Greeks did was right', and 'In the art of sculpture the Greeks were gods'.4 Best known today for his Tinted Venus, 1851-53, in which he reintroduced the ancient aesthetic of polychrome sculpture through wax-based pigments on marble, Gibson came to be derided by critics who considered this sculpture and his other coloured figures to be failed experiments.5 As a result, for most of the twentieth century, much of his oeuvre was disregarded in the wake of abstract art and modernism, although compared to his contemporaries Gibson always was acknowledged as a leading figure in the Roman school of sculpture. What has been ignored by most scholars, however, is a closer study of other aspects of Gibson's work, including the reproduction and dissemination of his sculptural designs in various media, which is what this article explores.6Gibson began his artistic career drawing pictures after prints he saw in a shop window in Liverpool. He apprenticed as a wood and stone carver and eventually made original sculptural works in a classical mode that gave him the opportunity to exhibit at the Liverpool Academy and meet his earliest patrons in this important mercantile city where he had been raised. He later resided in London for more than a year, where he learned about the art and business of sculpture production from Joseph Nollekens. Although he never officially attended the Royal Academy schools, he met and was influenced by the teachings of John Flaxman and Henry Fuseli, and he became an adherent of the concept of disegno, ultimately utilizing it to expand his sculptural body of work into other reproductive media so as to disseminate classical subjects around the world.At the age of twenty-seven, Gibson arrived in Rome in 1817 and began studying under the master sculptor Antonio Canova, becoming his first official British pupil.7 Although it had been Gibson's intention to return to London, he remained in Rome the rest of his life, calling the city 'the very university of art, where it is the one thing talked about and thought about'.8 His election as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1833 and a full member in 1836 gave him the cachet of an important sculptor among his countrymen.9 Gibson's earliest patrons in Rome were British aristocrats on tour, such as the Dukes of Devonshire and Northumberland, who commissioned for their country estates works in marble based on his drawings and plaster models. As his reputation grew, his patronage by royalty came to include Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, and Czar Alexander II. But his largest patron base was from the rising middle classes: men and women whose families had earned their fortunes through industry and were eager to rise socially and culturally with their new-found wealth. Conscious of the aesthetic importance of classically-inspired art, Gibson accommodated the needs of his patrons through regular commissions of works in marble that his large studio crafted; however, he also encouraged the dissemination of his designs in other less-expensive media, such as statuettes, cameos, and prints. The international dissemination of his works in various reproductive media thus reinforced his reputation as one of the most important sculptors of the nineteenth century.By mid-century, as Gibson's studio in Rome grew from being exclusively a production warehouse to increasingly a social space catering to middle-class visitors, so too did his role as a sculptor change. With his fame rising and his works more commonly known in Great Britain and globally, Gibson by age fifty fashioned himself a gentleman artist, not a labouring craftsman. …