Michael and Satan (Sketch)
Victoria and Albert Museum,
South Kensington
Flaxman was the first English sculptor of European reputation. He was born in 1755 and died in 1826, so his career practically coincided with that of Canova. The son of a manufacturer of plaster of Paris casts, the boy Flaxman was terribly handicapped by a threatened deformity. But when he laid aside his crutches at ten years of age, his natural bent towards art began to display itself definitely. In 1770 he won the silver medal for sculpture at the Royal Academy. Patrons, however, proved few and far between and the necessity for making a living drove Flaxman to accept the commissions for the classical designs made famous through their association with Wedgwood pottery. His real career as a sculptor began in 1787. Like Thorvaldsen he could have said: “I was born when I first saw Rome. Before I merely existed.” When Flaxman returned to England eight years later, his future was assured. He became an A.R.A. in 1797 and an R.A. in 1800.
Perhaps no modern artist has produced work more nearly approaching the sculpture of Greece in spirit. In Flaxman’s best known work, the “Michael and Satan,” we can trace a severe restraint which is foreign to the more florid styles of Canova and Thorvaldsen and which brings the Englishman far closer to the masters of the Hellenic school whom he sought to follow. He equalled either Canova or Thorvaldsen in fertility and purity of design, particularly in bas-relief. But Flaxman also suffered as they had done from a too close adherence to the eclectic influences derived from Winckelmann. When Flaxman sought to portray the intense passions, his borrowed style betrayed him. If intensity of emotion was of little moment in sculpture, Flaxman would rank among the immortals. As a fact, we know that it constitutes its very life. Consequently, one can only regret that it was not given to the first great English sculptor to emulate the achievements of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and evolve a style capable of expressing the manifold energies of his age in marble, as truly as they did on canvas. As it was, the genius of Flaxman only served to perpetuate a false ideal. His English followers made no effort to rid themselves of the methods which had marred even the finest work of the earlier masters of their school. Truth to tell, Flaxman’s reputation depends much more upon his non-sculptural work than it does upon his marbles—upon his Homeric illustrations, upon his drawings, with their mysterious reminiscences of Blake, for instance. Flaxman’s facility in design was so tremendous that it alone made him stand out far above his fellow sculptors. Added to this, there is a certain natural austerity in his sculptures which distinguishes them from the conventional theatricalities of the earlier eighteenth-century artists and the Georgian and early Victorian sentimentalities which followed. But it would be untrue to suggest that as a sculptor he rose superior to his age. Weighed in the scale of European art, ancient and modern, the life-work of Flaxman contains the same lesson as that of Canova and Thorvaldsen. It stands as a perpetual memorial of the eternal law, that no living art can be built upon a borrowed style—even though that style be Greek.