John Flaxman - Marriage

Marriage

In 1782, aged 27, Flaxman married Anne Denman, who assisted him throughout his career. She was well-educated, and the devoted companion of her husband's fortunes and of his travels. They set up house in Wardour Street, and usually spent their summer holidays as guests of the poet Hayley, at Eartham in Sussex. After five years, in 1787, they found themselves with means enough to travel, and set out for Rome, where they took up their quarters in the Via Felice.

Records of Flaxman's residence in Italy exist in the shape of drawings and studies. He stopped modelling for Wedgwood, but continued to direct the work of other modellers employed for the manufacture at Rome. He had intended to return after a stay of a little more than two years, but was detained by a commission for a marble group of a Fury of Athamas, a commission attended in the sequel with circumstances of infinite trouble and annoyance, from the notorious Comte-Evéque, Frederick Augustus Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol.

He did not, as it turned out, return until the summer of 1794, after an absence of seven years, having in the meantime executed another ideal commission (a "Cephalus and Aurora") for Thomas Hope, and having sent home models for several sepulchral monuments, including one in relief for the poet William Collins in Chichester cathedral, and one in the round for Lord Mansfield in Westminster Abbey.

What gained Flaxman his general fame was not his work in sculpture proper, but those outline designs to the poets, in which he showed not only to what purpose he had made his own the principles of ancient design in vase paintings and bas reliefs, but also by what a natural affinity, better than all mere learning, he was bound to the ancients and belonged to them. The designs for the Iliad and Odyssey were commissioned by Mrs Hare Naylor; those for Dante by Hope (originally published in London in 1807); those for Aeschylus by Lady Spencer; they were all engraved by Piroli, not without considerable loss of the finer and more sensitive qualities of Flaxman's own lines. In fact, Flaxman's one hundred and eleven illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy are known as one of his greatest achievements: deceptively simple, awash with pathos, and recalling antique imagery in a classical Greek style, they themselves became an inspiration for such artists as Goya and Ingres, and were used as an academic source for 19th century art students.

During their homeward journey the Flaxmans travelled through central and northern Italy. On their return they took a house in Buckingham Street, Fitzroy Square. Immediately afterwards the sculptor published a spirited protest against the scheme already entertained by the Directory, and carried out two years later by Napoleon, of equipping at Paris a vast central museum of art with the spoils of conquered Europe.