Samuel Smiles：Thrift, Excerpt 175

Students of Art have had to practise self-denial in many ways. Quentin Matsys, having fallen in love with a painter's daughter, and determined to win her. Though but a blacksmith and a farrier, he studied art so diligently, and acquired so much distinction, that his mistress afterwards accepted the painter whom she had before rejected as the blacksmith. Flaxman, however, married his wife before he had acquired any distinction whatever as an artist. He was merely a skilful and promising pupil. When Sir Joshua Reynolds heard of his marriage, he exclaimed, "Flaxman is ruined for an artist!" But it was not so. When Flaxman's wife heard of the remark, she said, "Let us work and economize; I will never have it said that Ann Denbam ruined John Flaxman as an artist." They economized accordingly. To earn money, Flaxman undertook to collect the local rates; and what with art and industry, the patient, hard-working, thrifty couple, after five years of careful saving, set out for Rome together. There Flaxman studied and worked; there he improved his knowledge of art; and there he acquired the reputation of being the first of English sculptors.

Source： https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14418
Locator：Excerpt 175 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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