Quick on the draw

The skills of John Flaxman, idol of all dilettanti’, brought the classics of literature to life, but also his fellow artists, as art dealer Tom Edwards tells Carla Passino

-  Carla Passino

TOM EDWARDS, managing director of art gallery Abbott and Holder, is busy practising self-delusion. ‘I am not a collector. My job brings me into contact with them every day, many are friends, but I know I am not one of them. The accumulation of pictures on my walls is the consequence of being a dealer, a sort of collateral damage. Why then,’ he ponders, ‘would I find it so difficult to part with this small, understated drawing by John Flaxman?’

Born in York, the son of a plaster-cast-maker, Flaxman (1775–1826) excelled at sculpture, but his fortune was founded on pottery and prints. A talented artist with a passion for classical subjects, he began exhibiting early and, by 1775, had started designing for Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery, including an Apotheosis of Homer that drew praise from Sir William Hamilton: ‘I never saw a bas relief executed in the true and simple antique style half so well.’

It was in part because of Wedgwood that Flaxman was able to go with his wife to Rome in 1787. Although by then he had already embraced monumental sculpture, the pottery helped fund his trip and he sent back several designs. His Italian stay extended to years, during which he made a marble sculpture, The Fury of Athamas from Ovid’s Metamor phoses, for Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, who predicted: ‘Flaxman will rise to be the first sculptor in Europe, the exquisite Canova not excepted’ (although this fulsome praise didn’t stop the clergyman from underpaying the sculptor).

However, it was a series of illustrations— scenes from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy and, after his return from Rome, the works of Aeschylus and Hesiod —that made Flaxman an international sensation. ‘As a draughtsman, his command of pure line was admired all over Europe,’ says Mr Edwards. ‘He was one of the few British artists of his time to gain genuine, international fame.’