John Gibson was the very thing that was nearest and dearest to his
benevolent heart. Mr. Francis showed Roscoe the boy's drawings and
models; and Roscoe's appreciative eye saw in them at once the
visible promise of great things to be. He had come to order a
chimney-piece for his library at Allerton, where his important
historical works were all composed; and he determined that the
clever boy should have a chief hand in its production. A few days
later he returned again with a valuable old Italian print. "I want
you to make a bas-relief in baked clay," he said to Gibson, "from
this print for the centres of my mantelpiece." Gibson was
overjoyed. The print was taken from a fresco of Raphael's in the
Vatican at Rome, and Gibson's work was to reproduce it in clay in
low relief, as a sculpture picture. He did so entirely to his new
patron's satisfaction, and this his first serious work is now duly
preserved in the Liverpool Institution which Mr. Roscoe had been
mainly instrumental in founding.

Roscoe had a splendid collection of prints and drawings at Allerton;
and he invited the clever Welsh lad over there frequently, and
allowed him to study them all to his heart's content. To a lad like
John Gibson, such an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the
works of Raphael and Michael Angelo was a great and pure delight.
Before he was nineteen, he began to think of a big picture which he
hoped to paint some day; and he carried it out as well as he was
able in his own self-taught fashion. For as yet, it must be
remembered, Gibson had had no regular artistic instruction: there
was none such, indeed, to be had at all in Liverpool in his day; and
there was no real art going on in the town in any way. Mr. Francis,
his master, was no artist; nor was there anybody at the works who
could teach him: for as soon as Mr. Francis found out the full