ATTRIBUTED TO JOHN CHEERE

The 'Apollo' brackets allude to the Sun-deity's Mount Parnassus role as leader of the Muses of artistic inspiration, and celebrate the triumph of Poetry. The laurel-wreathed and lyre-bearing deity, perched in a grotto of flowered 'rocailles', hearkens the swan's song; while palm-bearing Fame attends and a monstrous figure, symbolising 'Envy', takes flight. Their serpentined design is conceived in the French 'picturesque' or 'natural' fashion associated with the sculptors Jacques Caffieri (d. 1755) and Charles Cressent (d. 1768), and has been attributed to the sculptor John Cheere (d. 1787). John Cheere first worked in partnership with his brother Sir Henry Cheere (d. 1781) in their celebrated Hyde Park Corner workshops, and around 1740 took over the yard of John Nost. He supplied lead and plaster busts, and is credited with the manufacture of related brackets supplied for Kirkleatham Hall, Yorkshire. The poetic pattern for this pair of 'Brackets for Bustos' is likely to have been invented for the 'Cabinet Room' at Felbrigg, Norfolk, which was designed for William Windham in the 1750s by the architect James Paine (d. 1789), whose 'Picturesque' decoration of the Mansion House, Doncaster was celebrated by his Plans, Elevations, Sections and other ornaments of the Mansion House of Doncaster, 1751, (Rococo: Art and Design in Hogarth's England, Victoria & Albert Museum, Exhibition Catalogue, 1984, nos. S30, S31 and S55).