AFTER THE ANTIQUE, ATTRIBUTED TO THE WORKSHOP OF JOHN CHEERE, CIRCA 1770

The sculptor brother of Sir Henry Cheere (d. 1781), and the better known of the two in his own day, John Cheere specialized in producing garden figures, and plaster or lead busts, often after other artists, for the decoration of libraries and staircases. In 1739 he acquired a yard at Hyde Park corner that probably had associations with the van Nost family of sculptors, and continued their tradition of supplying lead garden statuary (see lots 138 & 161). He completed a gilt equestrian statue of William III for St James' Square, London, in 1739, and in 1751 a marble statue of George II for the market place St Helier, Jersey. The Portuguese minister in London purchased 98 lead statues from him for the royal palace of Queluz, near Lisbon, in 1756 and he also supplied statues for Stourhead, including those of Pomona, Mercury, Apollo and Bacchus. David Garrick, the actor, commissioned a life-size lead figure of William Shakespeare for Stratford-upon-Avon and in 1774, Cheere supplied Wedgwood with plaster busts of Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle and Homer for reproduction in black basalt.

This bust is a modified version of the Capitoline Venus, a full length marble figure which was discovered in Rome by at least the 1670s (Haskell and Penny, loc. cit.). Here, the artist has altered the arrangement of the hair by including the delicately chiselled locks which trail across the goddess's shoulders. Another related Venus figure was in the collection of the Earls of Pembroke and is illustrated in Rynack. The quality of this chiselling can be compared to other figures by Cheere, including a full-length figure of Minerva at Southill, Bedfordshire (illustrated in M. Whinney, Sculpture in Great Britain 1530-1830, revised by John Physick, London, 1988, fig. 174).