Gibson, John (sculptor)

John Gibson ( Eng. John Gibson , June 19, 1790 - January 27, 1866 ) - Welsh sculptor.

John gibson
John gibson
Date of Birth	June 19, 1790 ( 1790-06-19 )
Place of Birth	Conwy , Wales
Date of death	January 27, 1866 ( 1866-01-27 ) (75 years)
Place of death	Rome , Italy
Allegiance	Great Britain
Genre	sculpture

The most significant of English sculptors, a student of S. Francis in Liverpool and A. Canova in Rome . The first works in which his talent was manifested were the statue of The Sleeping Shepherd in Rome, the groups Mars and Cupid (1819), Psyche carried by marshmallows (1821) and the bas-relief Date of Hero with Leander (1821) . These works brought him loud fame in Italy, as well as in his homeland, to which his friends invited him to return, assuring that he would gain both honor and wealth there. But the artist chose to remain in Rome, although he continued to send his subsequent works to England, which were favorably received by her public. Among them are, by the way, the statue he repeated seven times: “Cupid disguised as a shepherd” and “Psyche tormented by Cupid”, which he himself recognized as the best of all his creatures. In 1844, for the exhibition of his statue of Guskisson (located on the London Stock Exchange), he came to London , and since then has visited this city almost every year. In one of these visits, he fashioned a model for a statue of Queen Victoria later executed in Rome (located in Buckingham Palace ). In it, imitating the polychromies of the ancients, he resorted to painting the surface with several colors, which, despite censures from various sides, were also used subsequently, as, for example, in the statue of Stephenson (1851) and the bust of the Prince of Welsh (1854).

John Gibson. Detail of the statue of William Huskisson in Pimlico Garden, London

In 1850, he fashioned in Rome a group of Queen Victoria on the throne with allegorical figures of Mercy and Justice (located in the building of the English Parliament) standing on his side and the statue of Venus, whose body he gave ivory color, to his hair a light blond color, a grid on his head - gilding. This work aroused a lot of talk in the artistic circles of England: some found it original and elegant, others - tasteless; the artist himself loved him more than his other works and performed it three times.

Gibson was a member of the art academies of London, St. Luke of Rome, Munich and some others. Dying in Rome, he bequeathed all his models and unfinished works, as well as a significant fortune (£ 32,000), acquired by labor, of the London Academy. Adhering, in relation to his direction, in general, to Canova’s style, Gibson should be considered not so much an artist with distinctive creativity, but rather a skilled imitator of antiques, whom he admired to such an extent that he looked at any newness in art as a detriment to beauty. His idealistic works, between which the most successful, the tombstone of Duke Leicester, in Longford , are significantly superior, in artistic terms, to his portrait statues.