CHANTREY, Sir Francis Legatt

Throughout his career Chantrey remained widely employed as a portraitist. However, he also had a successful career as a designer of funerary monuments. Here, his sense of humanity enabled him to create images that were tender without being sentimental.

Chantrey established his reputation largely through the faithful realism of his work. A man of humble birth, he had little education and his only training in sculpture was an apprenticeship to a wood carver. Nevertheless, he possessed superb skill and a genuine interest in personality. Such qualities came to the fore in his portrait bust of the radical politician Horn-Tooke. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1812, it made his reputation. Subsequently, he was commissioned to do a marble statue of the king (destroyed).

Sir Francis Legatt Chantrey enjoyed enormous popularity in England during his lifetime. Among the eleven funerary monuments that he executed for Westminster Abbey in London is that of Mrs. Siddons, the great actress, who died in 1831. Commissioned by Macready, it stands in the St. Andrew chapel in the north transept. The actress who had inspired all the English painters of the 18th century appears here as a Roman Vestal Virgin, in a stiff, cold composition lacking imagination and typical of the style of this Neoclassical sculptor.

In 1815 the sculptor received the commission from Mrs Ellen Robinson for a monument to her daughters who had died in a fire. Chantrey had taken a death mask of one daughter, but this was only for orientation in the facial form. The children do indeed lie there as if they could be awoken at any moment.

The naturalism of the depiction is enhanced by a breath of poetry. Both the embrace with which the younger girl turns to the older one for help and the snowdrops that she holds in her hand were details that stirred emotions in an age easily and willingly moved to tears.