English sculptor. He worked in Rome and was the central figure of the Anglo-Roman school and one of the leading exponents of Neoclassicism in the 19th century. He had English, American and Italian patrons and was honoured by academies throughout Europe. Two of his brothers, Solomon Gibson (c. 1796-1886) and Benjamin Gibson (1811-51), were also sculptors.
Throughout his career Gibson took heads from his full body figures, turning them into elegant busts; the present marble appears to be one such example.
The bust is signed: I GIBSON FECIT ROMA
When it was established that the Greeks had in fact coloured their statues, Gibson responded with his Tinted Venus. The added naturalism provided by colour proved unacceptable to Gibson’s supporters and very nearly wrecked his career. He survived, however, to become the grand old man of British sculpture in the Victorian era. From Italy, where he settled in 1817, he made visits to England in 1844, 1850, and 1861, and executed an austere portrait of Queen Victoria herself for the Houses of the Parliament in London.
Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 6 minutes):
Sir Edward Elgar: Pomp and Circumstance March op. 39 No. 1
Alongside to the new classicism at the end of the eighteenth century came a passionate concern with exact naturalistic representation in every field of art. An art which was so very much an imitation, whether of nature or of another epoch, naturally discouraged individuality among artists, and this uniformity appeared as much in the work of those at the top as in that of the hundreds of their followers. They formed the taste in sculpture, and this taste was to continue in the academies and dominated the graveyards right through the nineteenth century. Gibson’s Tinted Venus is an illustration of its strong persistence.
Britain’s principal sculptor in the 1850s, John Gibson spent most of his time in Rome, where he devoted himself to a kind of sculpture that was deeply influenced by Thorvaldsen. In a specially designed temple at the 1862 International Exhibition he showed the Venus, that testifies not only for his admiration for Greek art but also to the close attention he paid to anatomy and modeling.
