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| - Sir Francis Legatt Chantrey (April 7, 1782–November 25, 1841), was an English sculptor of the Georgian era.He was born at Norton near Sheffield, where his father, a carpenter, had a small farm. His father died when he was eight; and his mother remarried, leaving him without a profession. At fifteen, he was on the point of being apprenticed to a grocer in Sheffield, when, having seen some wood-carving in a shop-window, he requested to be made a carver instead, and was placed with a Mr Ramsey, woodcarver, in Sheffield. In this situation he became acquainted with Raphael Smith, a distinguished draughtsman in crayon, who gave him lessons in painting; and Chantrey, eager to become 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. He exhibited pictures at the Royal Academy for some years from 1804, but from 1807 onwards devoted himself mainly to sculpture. The sculptor Joseph Nollekens showed recognition of his merits. In 1807 he married his cousin, Miss Ann Wale, who had some property of her own. His first imaginative work in sculpture 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 John Horne Tooke, procured him commissions to the value of £2,000. 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, received the degree of M.A. from Cambridge, and that of D.C.L. from Oxford, and in 1835 was knighted. He died after an illness of only two hours' duration, 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. Chantrey's works are extremely numerous. The principal are the statues of George Washington in the State-house at Boston, Massachusetts; of George III in the Guildhall, London; of George IV at Brighton; of William Pitt the Younger in Hanover Square, London; of James Watt in Westminster Abbey and in Glasgow; of William Roscoe and George Canning in Liverpool; of John Dalton in Manchester Town Hall; of Lord President Blair and Lord Melville in Edinburgh, etc. Of his equestrian statues the most famous are those of Sir Thomas Munro in 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 appear, in design, to have owed something to Thomas Stothard; Chantrey knew his own scantiness of ideal invention or composition, and always sought aid from others for such attempts. In busts, he had a ready unconstrained air of life, a prompt vivacity of ordinary expression. Allan Cunningham and Henry 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 William Shakespeare. (en)
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