John Flaxman as a Religious Sculptor

John Flaxman, a friend and contemporary of William Blake, was the first British sculptor to achieve a major international reputation; he was also a founder member of the Swedenborg Society.

John Flaxman (English Neoclassical Sculptor, 1755-1826) seems to his contemporaries to be two quite different people. On the continent he was the famous author of outline illustrations to Homer and Dante, but in Britain he was a kind of national sculptor whose monuments were in hundreds of churches throughout the country. David will be looking at Flaxman as a religious sculptor, especially at his Swedenborgian connections and imagery.

David Bindman is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University College London. He was educated at Oxford, Harvard and the Courtauld Institute, University of London. He has held fellowships at Yale, National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Getty Institute, and the Du Bois Institute, Harvard. He has written mainly on British art but also on the representation of race. He is the author of Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race, 1700-1800, (2002) and has edited The History of British Art, 3 vols., (2008).

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