The Fall of the Rebel Angels

Gibson, the great classical sculptor, spent his formative years in Liverpool and was then a close friend of the poet, historian and politician William Roscoe (1753 -1831), to whose guidance and example Gibson was deeply indebted. Gibson studied Roscoe's collection of Old Master drawings and drew this cartoon in Liverpool when he was just twenty years old. He wrote of it: "Having thus free access to Mr Roscoe's fine collections I became well acquainted with the inventions of Michelangelo...and his genius began to have influence over me. Before I was nineteen I began to think of a large cartoon. The Subject was the fall of Satan and his Angels."