Details of Sculptor

Surname

Scheemakers

Alternative Surname

First Name

Henry

Initial of Surname

S

Year of Birth/Baptism

1700

Flourished

Year of Death

1748

Biographical Details

The son of the sculptor, Peter Scheemaekers the Elder (1652-1714) and Catharina, née van der Hulst, he was christened in Antwerp Cathedral on 4 November 1700. He and his elder brother, Peter Scheemakers, were both less than five feet in height.
Henry probably had some training in his father’s workshop, but he followed his brother to Copenhagen, where he worked for three years under the Danish court sculptor, Johann Adam Sturmberg (1683-1741). He was in London by 1726 and on 29 October 1727 he married Catharina Hennekin at the Portuguese Embassy chapel. Their son, Peter (†1765) was a sculptor and architect, who does not appear to have practised in England. In his will Henry’s brother, Peter, mentions a nephew, Thomas Henry Scheemakers and his two sisters, who may have been Henry’s children.
In 1726 he acquired a dwelling and premises in St Margaret’s Lane, Westminster, near the east end of the Abbey and adjacent to the workshops of Henry Cheere, with whom he was working in 1727. The Westminster rate books list ‘Mr. Skymaker’ in St Margaret’s Lane in 1729, and by 1732 he had two sets of premises, one of them a ‘shop’. He evidently had a good reputation, for in 1727 John Nost II, one of the most respected sculptors in London, apprenticed his son John Nost III to Scheemakers at a fee of £40.
The first known collaborative work by Scheemakers and Cheeere, is a small, undistinguished wall tablet to members of the Twyman family, c1728, at Westbere, Kent, which takes the form of a swagged escutcheon (1). It is signed by both sculptors. The monument to Robert, 1st Duke of Ancaster, at Edenham, Lincs, erected in 1728 and signed ‘H.Scheemakers et H. Cheere Inven et Fecit’ was a more ambitious commission (2). The authoritative life-size standing effigy has cropped hair, the garb of a Roman general and a pronounced contrapposto pose, which causes the left hip to jutt forward awkwardly. He stands in a niche between Corinthian columns and above is a charming winged head with depending floral swags beneath a triangular pediment supporting reclining cherubs. Cheere and Scheemakers are known to have collaborated also on at least one chimneypiece (7).
Scheemakers’s monuments executed alone reflect little interest in the growing fashion for classical sculpture, so successfully exploited by his brother, Peter. The large monument to Sir Francis and Lady Page, is well designed and of a high technical quality, but the composition of tiered reclining effigies in contemporary dress is dated (5). Another work that ignored the new taste is the tablet to John Bradbury (4). It presents a resurrection scene in relief, within a richly curved baroque frame: a kneeling boyish figure is helped heavenwards by a group of circling putti.
Scheemakers apparently failed to prosper in England, for in 1733 he held a sale of his possessions prior to his departure for Paris. It included models and designs said to be by Denis Plumier and the revered European sculptors, Bernini and Duquesnoy, as well as reliefs, statues, busts, chimneypieces, a monument and a variety of rich polychrome marbles. In France he was involved in decorative programmes in the châteaux of Dampierre and St-Cloud, where he died in 1748.
IR
Literary References: Daily Post, no 4320, 20 July 1733; Vertue III, 61; Baert c1870, 74; Register of the Catholic Chapels, 1941, 37; Weilbachs Kunstnerleksikon, 136; Webb 1957 (3), 115-120; Gunnis 1968, 341; Whinney 1988, 191-3; Roscoe 1990, 26, 29-30; Craske 2000 (2), 96
Archival References: Baptismal Records, OLV Zuid, 4 November 1700 (Antwerp City Archives, PR 19)
Will: Peter Scheemakers PROB 11.1082, 17 v-r , 19 June 1771