1787, and took up their quarters at Rome in the Via Felice. They meant to stay abroad only two years, but stayed seven. Their residence at Rome was varied with summer trips to other parts of Italy, the records of some of which are preserved in the artist's extant sketch-books and journals. These prove him to have been a zealous and intelligent student, not only of the remains of classic art, to which by sympathy and vocation he was more especially attracted, but also of the works, then generally despised, of the Gothic and early Renaissance ages in Italy. At Rome he soon attracted the notice of the resident and travelling English dilettanti. A Mr. Knight, of Portland Place, for whom he had already executed a figure of Alexander, and just before leaving England a Venus and Cupid, ordered from him a reduced copy of the Borghese vase (these works are now at Wolverley Hall, Worcestershire); `Anastasius' Hope of Deepdene, a group of 'Cephalus and Aurora;' the notorious Frederick Hervey, earl of Bristol and bishop of Derry, one on a great scale of the `Fury of Athamas.' Flaxman's relations with the last-named patron and his agent were a source of great annoyance to him; the price fixed was 600l.; the instalments were unpunctually doled out; the work remained long on hand, and when completed left the sculptor heavily out of pocket (the group is now at Ickworth, Bury St. Edmunds). Flaxman also spent much time on his own account on an attempt, not very successful, to restore and complete as a group the famous ancient fragment at the Vatican known as the Belvedere torso; the cast of this group he in later life destroyed. He was further engaged while at Rome in preparing designs for a monument in relief to the poet Collins for Chichester Cathedral, and for one in the round to Lord Mansfield for Westminster Abbey. On behalf of the Wedgwoods he found much to employ him at first, less afterwards. The occupation which brought him most repute, though at first slender enough profit, during his stay at Rome was not that of a sculptor or modeller, but that of a designer of illustrations to the poets. Mrs. Hare Naylor (born Georgiana Shipley, and mother of the distinguished brothers, Francis, Augustus, and Julius Hare [q. v.]) gave him the commission for the designs to the `Iliad' and `Odyssey,' seventy-three drawings in all at fifteen shillings each. These drawings no sooner began to be shown about among artistic circles at Rome than they aroused the greatest enthusiasm. Mr. Hope followed suit with a commission for similar designs for Dante; Lady Spencer with one for a set of Æschylus subjects (at a guinea each). All four series were successively handed over to Piroli to be engraved, and the first copies of each were printed at Rome in 1793; the plates were then shipped to England, for home publication, and those for the `Odyssey' getting lost on the voyage, the designs were re-engraved for Flaxman by his friend Blake. The engraved versions of the designs fall far short of the originals, neither Piroli nor Blake (in this his first attempt) having at all succeeded in rendering with the burin the delicacy and expressiveness of Flaxman's pen work.
In an age much given to the cultivation of classic art and virtù, Flaxman, even as a lad, with no models before him except the plaster casts of his father's shop, had shown in his drawings and models an instinct beyond that of any of his contemporaries for the true qualities of Greek design. He had the secret, almost lost to modern art, of combining ideal grace of form and rhythmical composition of lines with spontaneousness and truth of pose and gesture, and the unaffected look of life. Sketching constantly, as was his habit, with pen and pencil the leading lines and masses of every scene and every action of daily humanity that caught his attention within doors or without, and at the same time studying ardently, since his arrival in Italy, the works of Greek design in ancient vases and bas-reliefs, he had greatly strengthened his natural gifts both for linear design and the expression of life and action. The best of the outlines to the Greek poets and Dante—and they are those which represent subjects of grace and gentleness, rather than subjects of violence or terror—are worthy of all the praise they have won. Their success was immediate and universal Fuseli, whose foible was certainly not diffidence, at once declared himself outdone as a designer. Canova, the prince of Italian sculptors, was generous in recognising those qualities in Flaxman which he lacked himself, and praised his work without stint. Schlegel, the chief of German critics, extolled it a few years later more vehemently still. French taste, then running towards ancient ideals, was equally favourable, and from within a few years of the publication of these designs until our own time the name of Flaxman has been perhaps more known and honoured abroad than that of any other English artist.
Flaxman's last occupation in Italy was that of getting packed and despatched the collection of casts from the antique which Romney had commissioned him to form, intending to place it for the use of students in his great painting room at Hampstead. The sculptor and his wife left Italy in the summer of 1794,
