CHANTREY, Sir Francis (1782-1841), a sculptor of repute, was born on 7th April 1782, at Norton, near Sheffield, where his father cultivated a small property of his own. His father died when he was eight years of age; and, his mother having married again, his profession was left to be chosen by his friends. In his sixteenth year he was on the point of being apprenticed to a lawyer in Sheffield, when, having seen some wood-carving in a shopwindow, he requested to be made a carver instead of a solicitor, and was accordingly placed with a Mr Ramsay, wood-carver in Sheffield. When in this situation, he became acquainted with Mr Raphael Smith, a distinguished draftsman in crayon, who gave him lessons in painting; and Chantrey, eager to commence his course as an artist, procured the cancelling of his indentures, and went to try his fortune in Dublin and Edinburgh, and finally in London. Here he first obtained employment as an assistant wood-carver, but at the same time devoted himself to portrait-painting, bust-sculpture, and modelling in clay. The sculptor Nollekens showed particular zeal in recognizing his merits. His first imaginative work was the model of the head of Satan, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1808. He afterwards executed for Greenwich Hospital four colossal busts of the admirals Duncan, Howe, Vincent, and Nelson; and so rapidly did his reputation spread that the next bust which he executed, that of Horne Tooke, procured him commissions to the extent of £12,000. From this period he was almost uninterruptedly engaged in professional labour. In 1819 he visited Italy, and became acquainted with the most distinguished sculptors of Florence and Rome. He was chosen an associate, and afterwards a member, of the Royal Academy (1816 and 1818), received the ...degree of Μ.A. from Cambridge, and that of D.C.L. from Oxford, and in 1837 was knighted. He died after an illness of only two hours* duration, on the 25th November 1841, having for some years suffered from disease of the heart, and was buried in a tomb constructed by himself in the church of his native village. The works of Chantrey are extremely numerous. The principal are the statues of Washington in the Statehouse of Boston, of George III. in London, of George IV. at Brighton, of Pitt in Hanover Square, London, of Watt in Westminster Abbey and at Glasgow, of Roscoe and Canning at Liverpool, of Dalton at Manchester, of Lord-President Blair and Lord Melville in Edinburgh, &c. Of his equestrian statues the most famous are those of Sir Thomas Munro at Calcutta, and the Duke of Wellington in front of the London Exchange. But the finest of Chantrey’s works are his busts, and his delineations of children. The figures of two children asleep in each other’s arms, which form a monumental design in Lichfield Cathedral, have always been lauded for beauty, simplicity, and grace. So is also the statue of the girlish Lady Louisa Russell, represented as standing on tiptoe and fondling a dove in her bosom. Both these works, it should, however, be explained, were executed from designs by Stothard; for Ohantrey knew his own scantiness of ideal invention or composition, and on system sought aid from others for such attempts. In busts, his leading excellence is facility —a ready unconstrained air of life, a prompt vivacity of ordinary expression. Allan Cunningham and Weekes were his chief assistants, and were indeed the active executants of many works that pass under Chantrey’s name. Chantrey was a man of warm and genial temperament, and is said to have borne a noticeable though commonplace resemblance to the usual portraits of Shakespeare. He bequeathed his valuable collection, and his whole fortune, after the death of Lady Chantrey, to the Royal Academy, for the encouragement of British sculpture and painting. It is but very recently that this bequest has taken actual effect; and the precise form in which the Academy mean to administer the trust still (1876) remains indefinite.
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