Details of Sculptor

Surname

Scheemakers

Alternative Surname

First Name

Peter

Initial of Surname

S

Year of Birth/Baptism

1691

Flourished

Year of Death

1781

Biographical Details

Peter Scheemakers played a major role in promoting the classical style in earlier 18th-century England and ran one of the most successful workshops of his generation. He was the eldest son of the sculptor Peeter Scheemaekers the Elder (1652-1714) and was baptised in Sint Jacobskerk, Antwerp on 10 January 1691. He was apprenticed without indenture to his father and may have visited Rome briefly in 1710, before spending three years around 1718 in Copenhagen with the court sculptor, Johann Adam Sturmberg (1683-1741). Scheemakers came to London c1720 and joined the studio of Denis Plumier, where he worked with Laurent Delvaux. Plumier died in 1721, soon after receiving the prestigious contract for a monument to the Duke of Buckingham in Westminster Abbey (1). The commission was executed by Scheemakers and Delvaux and it gave them the opportunity to advertise their confidence with the classical idiom: the Duke’s effigy was one of the first Roman warriors on an English monument with cropped hair instead of the customary full-bottomed wig, as well as classical armour. Scheemakers then worked briefly for Francis Bird at St Paul’s Cathedral on the west pediment relief and one of the colossal statues, before going into partnership with Delvaux from premises in Millbank,Westminster. Over the next six years they worked on two large monuments for country churches, using effigies clad all’antica (2, 5), at least one pair of seductive nude statuettes (110) and several pairs of garden figures after the Antique, in which each sculptor took responsibility for one statue (107, 108, 114).
In 1728 the two sculptors sold their collection of models and prints and advertised their intention of travelling to Italy ‘to form & improve their studies’( Vertue III, p. 36). In Rome they took lodgings in the Palazzo Zuccari, near the Piazza di Spagna, where Scheemakers remained until 1730. He attracted the attention of English collectors: in a letter to Samuel Hill in Venice, Thomas Fonnereau, who was in Rome, noted ‘[there is] a very clever fellow...his name is Schielmaker...I was thinking as you had a mind for the Meleager that perhaps you’d be willing to have some good statue copied. If so, I believe you could not employ anyone more able...[He] has copied the Hermaphrodite of Borghese about 2 ft long which he asks 120 [cru?, francs?] for...if you have a mind for any of these I’ll buy ‘em for you and gett’em cheaper if they’ll take less’ (Cheshire RO DET 4674/36). Vertue noted the sculptor’s unusual application to his studies in Rome and the fine quality of his models after the Antique, which were displayed in the London workshop soon after his return (118). These have not survived.
Scheemakers returned to London without Delvaux, set up again in Millbank, and by 1732 he had completed four major monuments, including one to Dr Hugh Chamberlen in Westminster Abbey, a reclining figure with personifications of Hygeia and Longevity at the head and feet (7). Delvaux carved the statue of Longevity, perhaps during one of his brief visits to London at that time. In 1733 Scheemakers lost the competition to provide an equestrian statue of King William III for Bristol to Michael Rysbrack. Failure was turned to success, for Scheemakers was given £50 in compensation by the Bristol patrons and then succeeded in selling his idea to the citizens of Hull, who ordered their own equestrian statue, completed in 1734 (123).
In 1732 Dr Richard Mead, who became the sculptor’s most important patron, gave him the first of nearly a dozen commissions (13). Through Mead’s influence the sculptor was commissioned to provide life-sized statues of two hospital founders, Thomas Guy, cast in bronze (124), and King Edward VI, realised in ‘Dutch metal’ (128). The sculptor’s naturalistic head of Dr William Harvey (168) was presented by Mead to the Royal College of Physicians.
In 1736 the sculptor moved to Old Palace Yard, Westminster, and then at Christmas 1741 to larger premises in Vine Street, Piccadilly. This final move, prompted by the expansion of his workshop, presumably took place after his marriage to Barbara la Fosse, of whom nothing is known, and the birth of his only child, Thomas Scheemakers. A policy for £1,500, taken out with the Sun Insurance Company in 1746, gives clues to the property’s layout: the modelling room was next to the living space and behind was a yard and workshops on two levels.
The work that brought Scheemakers particular recognition was the memorial to Shakespeare in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey (46), designed by William Kent, who was responsible to a ‘committee of taste’, of which Mead was a member. Raised in war time, this tribute to a great Englishman aroused a patriotic response and brought Scheemakers wide acclaim. During the next decade he was in constant demand, whilst his rival, Rysbrack, suffered a diminution in popularity. In comparing the work of the two sculptors, Vertue was disparaging of Scheemakers’s use of a high surface polish, an economical substitute for textural variety. He also hinted that sharp practice allowed the sculptor to undercut Rysbrack’s prices.
Praise and success clearly turned Scheemakers’s head. He was impudent to Lord Oxford and arrogant with the City fathers when the commission for pedimental sculpture at the Mansion House went to competition in 1744 (218). Asked to provide a second model, he refused to do so, declaring he had carved enough sculpture to prove his talent. Sir Robert Taylor won the contract.
During the 1740s Scheemakers turned out nearly 40 monuments, including several in Westminster Abbey to heroes of the War of the Austrian Succession. These were formulaic compositions focussing on a portrait bust or pictorial relief above an inscription panel. In some of his civilian monuments he found room for invention: Marwood William Turner’s standing effigy at Kirkleatham (50), was a deliberate reworking of the Shakespeare memorial to honour a scholar, and the monument to Marmaduke Coghill, an eminent judge at Drumcondra, Co Dublin (51), made use of a seated effigy, an early example of a convention for representing advocates, that gained currency later in the century.
Between 1736 and 1742 the sculptor worked on garden sculpture at Stowe and then at Rousham, both schemes supervised by Kent. At Stowe he was responsible for a large rectangular high-relief depicting Britannia receiving gifts from the four quarters of the world, carved for the Palladian bridge (220). This was unsuccessful in the restricted site and was later re-used and adapted for the pediment of the Temple of Concord and Victory. He also provided busts and statues as ornaments for buildings in the Elysian Fields (125, 128, 165) and portrait heads of Lord Cobham and his political allies for the Temple of Friendship (162, 170, 172. At Rousham, the sculptor’s knowlege of Roman sculpture put him in a strong position to supply terms and figures after the Antique for the upper lawn (130-31).
His first known set of library busts was for Richard Mead, who ordered heads of Shakespeare, Milton and Pope for his home in Great Ormond Street, London around 1734 (163). Two sets of heads of English poets for Frederick, Prince of Wales followed soon after, one of which was presented by the prince to Alexander Pope (165). The first commission for a university library, at Trinity College, Dublin, was for 14 marble busts of English and classical literary heroes (178); the size of the order was overwhelming, even for Scheemakers’s large studio, and Horace Walpole suggests that six were supplied by Louis François Roubiliac, working in sub-contract. Near the end of his career there was another university commission, for Trinity College, Cambridge, where he carved four uninspired portraits of contemporary alumni (185, 186, 188, 189). Many of his busts and the heads for several statues were reproduced in plaster using the life-sized models to make moulds. This was a lucrative exercise which he apparently initiated in 1747, when he announced his intention of marketing sets of five plaster casts from his models made in Rome, to be sold at five guineas per set. His last surviving sale catalogue (6-7 June 1771) included 13 moulds and casts of statuettes from the antique as well as casts from a number of busts of contemporaries.
In 1751 the sculptor won his most lucrative contract, for the massive Shelburne monument at High Wycombe (84), a doubly satisfying prize since it was won in competition with Roubiliac, who was now emerging as a serious rival. It followed the sculptor’s well-tried formula (albeit on a grand scale) of an architectural frame enclosing effigies in classical dress.
The sculptor’s health deteriorated in the mid-1750s and he auctioned much of his property in 1755, 1756 and 1757, intending to reduce his practice and move to rural Isleworth in Middlesex. By 1759 however he had rallied and he then went into a profitable partnership with the architect, James Stuart, whose knowledge of the Antique now eclipsed his own.
Stuart’s ambitious design for the monument to Admiral Watson in Westminster Abbey combined allegorical figures of captives with palm trees and a standing toga-clad effigy (94); more dignified is the monument to the Earl of Hardwicke at Wimpole (96), which has a massy sarcophagus flanked by Greek-inspired Virtues. Scheemakers also worked under Stuart’s direction at Shugborough, where he carved a delicate relief for the Shepherd’s Monument (222) and ornaments for the Triumphal Arch (219). A few commissions continued to be executed independent of Stuart, of which the most notable is a group of three statues of heroes of the United East India Company in Roman armour (145).
All work went out of the workshop in his name until 1771, when he left England, and Thomas Scheemakers continued to show models at exhibitions under his father’s name until 1780. Scheemakers returned to Antwerp with savings estimated by Farington at £3,000-£4,000. Investments from property enabled him to live in the affluent quarter by St Jacobskerk, where he died on 12 September 1781. He was buried in St Jacobskerk.
Scheemakers’s impressive output meant that he must have had a team of 20-30 assistants and apprentices, though most of their names at this period are unknown. During his early years in partnership with Delvaux, Prince Hoare, Charles Stanley and perhaps Henry Cheere, were workshop members and much later, in 1747, he broke a lifetime’s habit by formally indenting an apprentice, Charles Manning. Joseph Nollekens RA joined the team in 1747 and stayed until 1762, working on the statue of Lord Clive shortly before he left for Italy. Thomas Scheemakers will have started his training around 1750 and was probably in control of the workshop by the later 1760s. Peter’s will, drawn up on 19 June 1771, mentions Christopher Ffinny, ‘my Mason’ and ‘Mr Vandermeulen Statuary’, both of whom received ten guineas, the only beneficiaries other than family members and a servant.
Scheemakers became particularly interested in the classical style in the wake of his visit to Rome and, on his return, played a major role in promoting it in England. He was, however, often obliged to temper the austerity to his chosen to suit the tastes of his patrons and, ironically, it was a naturalistic figure, the Shakespeare for Westminster Abbey, which brought him fame. By the early 1750s, when Roubiliac’s revolutionary compositions began to attract fashionable interest, most of Scheemakers’s commissions were coming from conservative clients, but while there was a taste for the classical ideal in sculpture, his reputation remained solid. He has been out of favour since the late 19th century and is still compared unfavourably with his principal rival, Rysbrack, who worked in a similar style and sometimes provided a more distinguished product, but generally charged higher prices. Scheemakers deserves credit as an astute workshop master in tune with contemporary needs, prepared to shave his profit margins and adapt his classicism to suit a broadening clientele. Unlike his two principal rivals, he was in full employment throughout his long career.
IR
Literary References: Vertue I,101, III, passim; Farington 7, 2494; Anecdotes, 1888, 376; Smith 2, 1828, passim; Farington III, 44; Roscoe,1987,1-10; Whinney 1988, 157-9, 182-90, 233-48; Roscoe 1990; Roscoe 1999, 163-304, repr 32-96; ODNB (Roscoe); Sullivan 2006, 388-94 (repr); Craske 2007, passim
Archival References: WCA, ratebooks, St Margaret, Westminster, 1723-8 (E.344-E.348), 1731 (E.352),1736 (E.362); ratebooks, St James, Piccadilly, 1767-73 (Watch Rates, E. 1721, D. 596-600); Rome, Vicariato Archive, Stato d’Anime, parish of S Andrea delle Fratte 1729, 1730, fols 53, 54 ; Sun Insurance, 1746, 1756, 1761
Will: PROB 11/1082 178 v-r
Miscellaneous Drawings: sketchbook of designs made in Rome, 1728-30, Huntington libr, San Marino, California, USA, 75.14.1975 (Roscoe 1990, Appendix 1); HMI, Leeds, 17/1991 (Leeds 1999, 57, repr); Soane, research lib, vol 37; VAM, P&D, D.1039-1887, D.1044-1887, D.1046-1887, D.1050 -1887; 8947; 8408-2
Auction Catalogues: Scheemakers and Delvaux 1728; Scheemakers 1755; Scheemakers 1756; Scheemakers 1757; Scheemakers 1771(1); Scheemakers 1771 (2)
Portraits of the Sculptor: William Hoare, profile drawing, c1738, etching, B.M, PDB, 1931-4; A B de Quertenmont, canvas with a statuette of Shakespeare in the background, Antwerp, 1776, NPG London 2675