Sir Francis Leg(g)att Chantrey RA was an English sculptor. He became the leading portrait sculptor in Regency era Britain, producing busts and statues of many notable figures of the time. He left the Chantrey Bequest (or Chantrey Fund) for the purchase of works of art for the nation, which was available from 1878 after the death of his widow.
Chantrey was born at Jordanthorpe near Norton (then a Derbyshire village, now a suburb of Sheffield), where his father had a small farm.His father, who also dabbled in carpentry and wood-carving, died when Francis was twelve; and his mother remarried, leaving him without a clear career to follow. At fifteen, he was working for a grocer in Sheffield, when, having seen some wood-carving in a shop-window, he asked to be apprenticed as a carver instead, and was placed with a woodcarver and gilder called Ramsay in Sheffield. At Ramsay's house he met the draughtsman and engraver John Raphael Smith who recognised his artistic potential and gave him lessons in painting, and was later to help advance his career by introducing him to potential patrons. In 1802 Chantrey paid £50 to buy himself out of his apprenticeship with Ramsay and immediately set up a studio as a portrait artist in Sheffield, which allowed him a reasonable income.
For several years he divided his time between Sheffield and London, studying intermittently at the Royal Academy Schools. In the summer of 1802 he travelled to Dublin, where he fell very ill, losing all his hair. He exhibited pictures at the Royal Academy for a few years from 1804, but from 1807 onwards devoted himself mainly to sculpture. Asked later in life, as a witness in a court case, whether he had ever worked for any other sculptors, he replied: "No, and what is more, I never had an hour's instruction from any sculptor in my life".
His first recorded marble bust was one of the Rev. James Wilkinson (1805–06), for Sheffield parish church. His first imaginative sculpture, a head of Satan was shown at the Royal Academy in 1808. In 1809 the architect Daniel Asher Alexander commissioned him to make four monumental plaster busts of the admirals Duncan, Howe, Vincent and Nelson for the Royal Naval Asylum at Greenwich, for which he received £10 each. Three of them were shown at the Royal Academy that year.
On 23 November 1809 he married his cousin, Mary Ann Wale at St Mary's Church, Twickenham. By this time he was settled permanently in London, His wife brought £10,000 into the marriage, which allowed Chantrey to pay off his debts, and for the couple to move into a house at 13 Eccleston Street, Pimlico, (recorded as Chantrey's address in the Royal Academy catalogues from 1810). He also bought land to build two more houses, a studio and offices.
In 1811 he showed six busts in the Royal Academy. The subjects included Horne Tooke and Sir Francis Burdett, two political figures he greatly admired; his early mentor John Raphael Smith, and Benjamin West. Joseph Nollekens placed the bust of Tooke between two of his own, and the prominence given to it is said to have had a significant influence on Chantrey's career. In the wake of the exhibition he received commissions amounting to £2,000. In 1813 he was able to raise his price for a bust to a hundred and fifty guineas, and in 1822 to two hundred.
He visited Paris in 1814, and again in 1815, this time with his wife, Thomas Stothard, and D. A. Alexander, visiting the Louvre where he especially admired the works of Raphael and Titian. In 1819 he went to Italy, accompanied by the painter John Jackson, and an old friend named Read. In Rome he met Thorvaldsen and Canova, getting to know the latter especially well.
In 1828 Chantrey set up his own foundry in Eccleston Place, not far from his house and studio, where large-scale works in bronze, including equestrian statues, could be cast.
Chantrey developed a procedure of making a portrait sculpture in which he would begin by making two life-sized drawings of his sitter's head, one full-face and one in profile, with the aid of a camera lucida. His assistants would then make a clay model based on the drawings, to which Chantry would add the finishing touches in front of the sitter. A plaster cast would be made of the clay model, and then a marble replica made of that. Allan Cunningham and Henry Weekes were his chief assistants, and made of many of the works produced under Chantrey's name. The debilitating effects of heart disease made him even more reliant on assistants in the last few years of his life.
Chantrey was rare among the leading sculptors of his time in not having visited Italy at a formative stage in his career. A writer in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1820 saw him as liberating English sculpture from foreign influence:
Those who wish to trace the return of English sculpture from the foreign artificial and allegorical style, to its natural and original character—from cold and conceited fiction to tender and elevated truth, will find it chiefly in the history of Francis Chantrey and his productions.

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