During his lifetime, John Gibson RA (1790-1866) was one of Britain’s leading sculptors; despite his prominence at the time, he is little known today. To coincide with the 150th anniversary of Gibson’s death, the exhibition John Gibson RA: A British Sculptor in Rome, hosted by the Royal Academy, presents over 30 rarely-exhibited works by the neoclassical artist and is accompanied by The Gibson Trail, a virtual exhibition that brings together all of Gibson’s works from London collections in one website.

The Gibson Trail provides images and information for more than 150 objects, including drawings, reliefs and sculptures from the collections at the Royal Academy, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Britain, the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Abbey, the National Portrait Gallery, and Buckingham Palace. The site also features an interactive map of London, indicating all the current locations of Gibson’s works and thematic walks between museums holding related objects.

Conceptualized by Anna Frasca-Rath (University of Vienna), the Gibson Trail is realized by the ACDH-CH. It is built upon the Open Source catalogue system Collective Access which implements the LIDO metadata schema developed by ICOM, an XML vocabulary for harvesting descriptive information about museum objects.

Project Duration

01 August 2015 – 01 October 2016

Twitter Hashtag

#GibsonTrail