Benjamin Phelps Gibbon


Benjamin Phelps Gibbon was a Welsh line-engraver. He concentrated on animal and portrait engravings, carried out for publishers.

Life

He was the son of the Rev. Benjamin Gibbon, vicar of Penally, Pembrokeshire, who died in 1813. He was educated at the Clergy Orphan School, and then was articled to Edward Scriven, the chalk-engraver. Although he was interested in acting, when he had worked his articles he went to work under the line-engraver John Henry Robinson.
Gibbon died at home in the cholera pandemic at Albany Street, Regent's Park, London, on 28 July 1851, in his forty-ninth year. He was unmarried.

Works

Gibbon's plates drew largely from the works of Sir Edwin Landseer, after whom he engraved:
He engraved also Wolves attacking Deer, 1834, after Friedrich Gauermann, with the landscape engraved by Edward Webb; and The Wolf and the Lamb, after William Mulready.
Gibbon's portraits include a half-length portrait of Queen Victoria, after William Fowler, engraved in 1840; and a head of his master, Edward Scriven, after Andrew Morton, engraved for John Pye's
Patronage of British Art, 1845. He left unfinished a plate from Thomas Webster's picture of The Boy with many Friends'', which was completed by P. Lightfoot.