Details of Sculptor

Surname

Gibson

Alternative Surname

First Name

Solomon, of Liverpool

Initial of Surname

G

Year of Birth/Baptism

1796

Flourished

Year of Death

1866

Biographical Details

A younger brother of John Gibson, Solomon was born near Conway, North Wales, a few years before his family moved to Liverpool. Few details have emerged of his early life but it is possible that he began his career working for Samuel and Thomas Franceys of Liverpool with his brother John. He exhibited for the first time in 1812, showing four works at the Liverpool Academy, including a terracotta statuette of Venus lamenting the death of Adonis, the only one of the four known to have survived (22, 27, 28, 29). In 1813 he showed a seated figure of Mercury (21). This was admired by the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence who, when he was presented with a copy of the figure, sent the sculptor a £10 note ‘as an encouragement’. Lord Colborn later bought a bronze cast of the statuette as the ‘the work of an unknown genius’ and was much surprised when John Gibson told him that it was, in fact, by his brother (DNB).
Gibson was working independently by 1816, the year the Liverpool street directories listed him as an artist for the first time, residing at 69 Islington. In 1818 he lived at 1 Green Lane, Pleasant Street and he changed address several times before settling in 1826 at 1 Hanley Street, where for the first time the directories described him as a sculptor rarther than an artist. In 1817 he carved a marble relief depicting Charity leading blind children to the tomb of their patron for the Royal School for the Blind in Liverpool to commemorate Pudsey Dawson, a philanthropist and former mayor (4). Another locally important commission was the monument to Dr Barrow, who had died heroically during a typhoid outbreak (5). He also executed a few portrait busts, including one of Dr Thomas Trail, a physician well known as a promoter of the arts in Liverpool (26). However, Gibson never really fulfilled his early promise. Much of his career was spent in designing and executing modest neoclassical funeral monuments for churches in Liverpool and the surrounding counties and he exhibited only sporadically, showing works at the Liverpool Academy and the Academy of the Liverpool Royal Institution in 1812–14, 1822, 1824 and 1830 and at the Royal Academy in 1816 and 1822. The kaleidoscope reviewed the Liverpool Exhibition of 1830-1 and noted ‘Mr Solomon Gibson has favoured the Exhibition with only two specimens since his return from Italy’ (vol 11, 110).
For many years he was financially dependent on John Gibson, whose work he defended at least twice in the Press. In 1834 he sent an anonymous letter to The Times headed ‘Statue of the Late Huskisson’, in which he complained of the inadequacy of the mausoleum designed by John Forster, the Liverpool architect, to house John’s statue of Huskisson, which he described as ‘a roundhouse for the temporary confinement of trespassers’ (3 Dec 1834, 3). Solomon had himself submitted a design ‘founded on the tomb of Lysicrates at Athens’ (ibid). He took to the Press in his own name in 1853 in a dispute with Sir Archibald Alison over a claim that John had originally been commissioned to provide a statue of the Duke of Wellington for Glasgow, a work executed by Carlo Marochetti (North British Mail, 25 Jan1853).
He was also a classical scholar and had a good knowledge of ancient Welsh literature. He visited his brother in Rome between 1826 and 1830. There he produced a plan for the restoration of Trajan’s Forum, which ‘showed great research and knowledge’ but was ‘very defective in drawing and perspective’ (Lit Gaz, 1819, 649, cited by Gunnis 1968 174). In 1835 he was elected a member of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, where he delivered papers on a remarkably diverse range of subjects. He also belonged to the Liverpool Polytechnic Society. In 1848 he designed a silver cradle for Joseph Mayer, the Liverpool silversmith and antiquary, which was presented to Mrs Horsfall, the mayor's wife, on the birth of her daughter and exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851.
Solomon died at 117, Rue de Lafayette, Paris on 24 January 1866 on his way to Rome to see John Gibson, who was also going through his final illness. The Royal Academy claimed and won Solomon’s estate on 22 January on the grounds that he had died before his brother John and that they were entitled to the money. He seems to have been a rudderless character: in a lost manuscript memoir of the sculptor, Joseph Mayer wrote, ‘There was an absence of purpose in the direction of his studies, and he passed through life a strange and useless though not commonplace man’ (DNB). John Gibson apparently thought him quite mad.
Eric Foster/EH
Literary References: Liverpool Directories 1816, 1818, 1826; Eastlake 1870, passim; DNB; Gunnis 1968, 173-4; ODNB (Stevens)
Additional MS Sources: Gibson/Ellis
Wills and Administrations: PPR admin, 22 March 1866, effects under £600
Miscellanous Drawings: study of a head, after Raphael, VAM P&D (pressmark K.5.b)
Portraits of the Sculptor: T Griffiths (ODNB)