His father, also named John (1726–1803), was well known as a moulder and seller of plaster casts at the sign of the Golden Head, New Street, Covent Garden, London.

In the competition for the gold medal of the academy in 1772, however, Flaxman was defeated, the prize being awarded by the president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, to a competitor named Engleheart.

During this period he received a commission from a friend of the Mathew family for a statue of Alexander the Great,[1] but he was unable to obtain a regular income from private contracts.

[2] His designs included the Apotheosis of Homer (1778), later used for a vase; Hercules in the Garden of Hesperides (1785); a large range of small bas-reliefs of which The Dancing Hours (1776–8) proved especially popular; library busts, portrait medallions, and a chess set.

His early memorials included those to Thomas Chatterton in the church of St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol (1780), Mrs Morley in Gloucester Cathedral (1784), and the Rev.

[3] His best monumental work was admired for its pathos and simplicity, and for the combination of a truly Greek instinct for rhythmical design and composition with a spirit of domestic tenderness and innocence.

They set up house in Wardour Street, and usually spent their summer holidays as guests of the poet William Hayley, at Eartham in Sussex.

[8] Flaxman created one hundred and eleven illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy which served as an inspiration for such artists as Goya and Ingres, and were used as an academic source for 19th-century art students.

[9] He had originally intended to stay in Italy for little more than two years, but was detained by a commission for a marble group of the Fury of Athamas for Frederick Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, which proved troublesome.

By the time of his return to England in the summer of 1794, after an absence of seven years, he had also executed Cephalus and Aurora, a group in marble based on a story in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

[11] Immediately after his return the sculptor published a protest against the scheme (already considered by the French Directory and carried out two years later by Napoleon) to set up a vast central museum of art at Paris to contain works looted from across Europe.

[8] While still in Rome, Flaxman had sent home models for several sepulchral monuments, including one in relief for the poet William Collins in Chichester cathedral, and one in the round for Lord Mansfield in Westminster Abbey.

He exhibited work at the academy annually, occasionally showing a public monument in the round, like those of Pasquale Paoli (1798) or Captain Montague (1802) for Westminster Abbey, of Sir William Jones for University College, Oxford (1797–1801),[8][12] of Nelson or Howe for St Paul's Cathedral, but more often memorials for churches, with symbolic Acts of Mercy or illustrations of biblical texts, usually in low relief.

[8] Soon after his election as Associate of the academy, he published a scheme for a grandiose monument to be erected on Greenwich Hill, in the form of a figure of Britannia 200 ft (61 m) high, in honour of British naval victories.

"[8] His most important sculptural works from the years following this appointment were the monument to Mrs Baring in Micheldever church, the richest of all his monuments in relief (1805–1811); that for the Cooke-Yarborough family at Campsall church, Yorkshire, those to Sir Joshua Reynolds for St Paul's (1807); to Captain Webbe for India (1810); to Captains Walker and Beckett for Leeds (1811); to Lord Cornwallis for Prince of Wales's Island (1812); and to Sir John Moore for Glasgow (1813).

[15] In the years immediately following his Roman period he produced fewer outline designs for publication, except three for William Cowper's translations of the Latin poems of John Milton (1810).

[16] Other late works included a frieze of Peace, Liberty and Plenty, for the Duke of Bedford's sculpture gallery at Woburn Abbey, and a heroic group of St Michael overthrowing Satan, for Lord Egremont's Petworth House,[8] delivered after Flaxman's death.

Most of the carving of his works was carried out by assistants; Margaret Whinney thought that, as a result, "the execution of some of his marbles is a little dull" but that "his plaster models, cast from his own designs in clay, frequently show more sensitive handling".