John Flaxman

John Flaxman was an English sculptor and draughtsman. His father also named John, was well known as a moulder and seller of plaster casts based in London. John Flaxman was the second son of John, the moulder by his first wife Lee. He was a sickly child, high shouldered, with a head too large for his body. His mother died when he was nine, and his father married another woman. He had little schooling and was largely self educated from his father's stock-in-trade. He studied classical literature in an effort to understand them. His father's customers helped him with translations of classical literature, advice and later with commissions of job.  Prominent among them were George Romeny, an English painter, Anthony Stephen Mathew, a clergy man and his wife Harriet, in whose house John Flaxman used to meet the best blue stocking society of the day. Here artists William Blake and Thomas Stothard became his close friends. 

John Flaxman, while living in Rome, was commissioned by Georgiana Hare Naylor to illustrate both The Odyssey and The Iliad.  He was paid in advance fifteen shillings for each drawing.

Flaxman began the work of drawings in December 1792, and was completed by 1793.

Thomas Hardy in his Far From The Madding Crowd (Chapter 38) refers  to the drawing "Ulysses killing the suitors.