Details of Sculptor

Surname

Cheere

Alternative Surname

First Name

John

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

1709

Flourished

Year of Death

1787

Biographical Details

John Cheere ran a thriving business for 50 years at Hyde Park Corner and dominated the market for high quality lead figures during the 1740s and 1750s. He supplied plaster statues, statuettes and busts as integral parts of parade room schemes and grand interiors and was one of the first to experiment with bronzing techniques for plaster busts.
He was the younger son of John and Mary Cheere of Clapham who were probably of French Huguenot origin, and was baptised in Clapham on 12 January 1709. His elder brother was the sculptor Sir Henry Cheere. John’s first wife, Theodosia Maria, died in 1767 ‘of a broken heart for the death of her father and only son’ (GM 1767, 280) and in 1768 he married Mary Wilmot of Clapham, who outlived him. They apparently had no children, for his nephews Charles Cheere and the Rev Sir William Cheere were the principal beneficiaries in his will.
At least one of his kinsmen was a haberdasher and John’s name appeared in the Apprenticeship Books in August 1711, when he was indented to another haberdasher, Henry Crofts. He must have had training as a sculptor, perhaps in Henry’s workshop and evidently acquired a sound knowledge of casting and mould-making techniques.
In 1737, Henry and John seem to have leased a property together from Anthony ‘Noast’ in Portugal Row, Piccadilly. Other sculptors in this growing centre for the trade included Thomas Carter I, William Collins, Richard Dickinson and Thomas Manning. Andrew Carpenter had ceased producing lead figures the previous year and it seems likely that Cheere acquired some of his early stock from Carpenter’s sale, for, like Carpenter, he later marketed figures of a Blackamoor with a Sundial (9), the Borghese Gladiator (6) and Diana with her Stag (78). After Manning’s death in 1747 John Cheere took over two of his yards.
His stock of lead subjects included figures after the antique, versions of 17th-century classical subjects at Versailles and some adaptations from the work of leading English contemporaries, particularly Peter Scheemakers (17, 73, 90) and Michael Rysbrack (17, 51). Since the leads were piece-moulded, Cheere could assemble parts in new configurations, for instance the figure of Time with a dial for Blair Castle (127), adapted from John Nost I’s Indian at Melbourne Hall, Derbys.
Cheere’s first recorded commission came to a disappointing conclusion. A lead equestrian figure of William III on a ‘curious’ Portland stone pedestal (4) was commissioned by the householders for St James’s Square, London, at a reported cost of 300 guineas. On 7 March 1739 Read’s Weekly Journal stated that the figure was ‘standing at his Yard’, but it was never installed. Meanwhile Cheere caught the attention of powerful patrons creating extensive landscape gardens. In the late 1730s two colossal statues were dispatched to Lord Carlisle at Castle Howard, a Borghese Gladiator (6) and one of Cheere’s bespoke items, a Dancing Faun (7), ‘cast ‘from a moddle made on purpose’ (Castle Howard J14/28/21). At a similar period, Henry, Duke of Kent (†1739), who had planted an avenue celebrating the Glorious Revolution of 1688 at Wrest Park, obtained a statue of its instigator, King William III, derived from Henry Cheere’s statue of the King at the Bank of England (4).
Cheere came to the attention of his most loyal early patron, the 2nd Duke of Atholl, before 1740, when lead figures forming the first of eight major orders were shipped north to Blair Castle (126). The client was evidently confident of Cheere’s ability to work in another medium for the next shipment, billed in 1742, comprised seventeen plaster busts, largely of classical and modern Men of Letters, Cheere’s first known series of library heads (84). The sculptor also sent up ten plaster statues and groups (11) with advice on their maintenance: ‘they shoud be painted over carefully with Flake White and Turpentine Oile when they are set up ... and a little Drying Oile’. Any parts broken during unpacking might be repaired with ‘Comon Glew’ (Cheere bills, bundle 55).
The business expanded considerably from the mid-1740s: in 1746, the year of the Battle of Culloden, Cheere sent to Ireland a statue of the hated victor, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (14). This was intended for St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, but discretion led to its erection in a less conspicuous site, at Parsonstown, King’s County (General Advertiser, 17 October 1746). In 1749 he opened an account with Drummond’s Bank and in 1750 he completed the commission that established his pre-eminence as a supplier of library busts, a series of twenty-four distinguished Fellows of All Souls’ College for the Codrington Library, Oxford (91). That year he also provided the celebrated River God for Stourhead (21), one of his most costly garden figures, a bespoke commission, never duplicated, for which he charged £98. In 1752 he was paid £38 for a statue of Mars for Hampton Court Palace (26).
Like any successful practioner in the luxury trades, Cheere kept abreast of stylistic trends and he responded to the rococo taste for naturalism by extending his range of garden figures to include commedia dell’arte and other rustic figures. The Duke of Atholl was a client once more. In 1753 his purchases included a gamekeeper ‘painted in proper coulers’ (27), sent with instructions that it should be washed carefully every two years and oiled with linseed. Two years later, ten bucolic subjects and six commedia figures (41) were sent up to Scotland to create a festive atmosphere in gardens evoking in miniature the public pleasure grounds of London.
Cheere’s business in garden figures was at its height in the late 1750s when an order of daunting size came in from Portugal. This was for over 60 figural works for the gardens of the Royal Palace at Queluz (46), which were being landscaped by Prince Pedro. The commission was handled by the minister in Lisbon, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, who had formerly been the Portugese Ambassador in London. A list of desired subjects was sent to his successor, D Luis da Cunha, who prosecuted the commission with thoroughness and zeal, visiting the workshop, and requesting modifications to the works. In July 1755 thirty-six crates of sculpture set sail for Queluz, along with a list of all the sculpture then offered by the yard (repr in Neto and Grilo 2006, 16-18). The Prince wasted little time putting in a new order, and in September another 58 crates were despatched, along with instructions from the sculptor for display, installation, care and future restoration. The gardens at Queluz represented almost a full display of Cheere's catalogue.
His yards, peopled with an increasingly eclectic range of near-life-size figures in white, gilt or polychrome paint was constituting something of a tourist attraction. An Irish clergyman visiting in 1761 was ‘introduced to an Assembly of gods and Goddesses, Juno, Minerva, Venus de Medici, Jupiter, Mars, Neptune and many Rural Deities Pan & Frisking Satyrs with an Infinite Multitude of Meer Dancers, Haymakers, Gladiators, Wrestlers, Huntsman & Fowlers, also Eagles, Vulturs, Hawks, Kites, Ostrich, peacocks, Lions, Leopards, tygers’ (Journals of Visits to England in 1761 and 1762, BL Add MSS 27951, 16 inset).
The demand for Cheere’s rococo garden figures dwindled in the early 1760s with changing tastes in garden design and the sculptor seems to have been anxious about declining profits. His postscripts to bills for statues submitted to Atholl in 1761 (55) and to Lord Coventry at Croome Court in 1763 (64) emphasize that he charged ‘your Lordship ... not a shilling more than if a merchant had them’ (Croome F60/13). The tone sounds defensive.
Cheere then changed orientation and faced a new demand, for less familiar classically inspired sculpture to decorate façades and parade rooms, taken from lead casts after unfamiliar Antique statues and busts. These were probably from moulds commissioned in Rome during the early 1750s by the architect Matthew Brettingham the Younger and acquired by Cheere soon after 1760. These figures appeared on the exterior both of the Temple of Apollo (119) and the Pantheon at Stourhead (120), as well as on Robert Adam’s exteriors at Kedleston (121, 122) and very likely at Saltram (123), whilst suites of plaster figures, notable for their fine detail, were introduced into the entrance hall at Bowood (62) and the Gallery at Croome Court (71). Cheere was also prepared to provide a maintenance service for his plaster figures: in 1756 Nathaniel Curzon was charged £1.16s for having two statues cleaned and polished in the workshop, and in 1779 the Earl of Coventry paid 8s to have 12 busts and a statue in his Piccadilly house cleaned, an annual event. On one occasion Cheere’s men went down to Croome Court to clean and repair sculpture (64).
Despite his prolific output, Cheere did not need a large or highly paid workforce and probably took on casual assistants like John Deare, who provided several models for him, when the need arose. Casting techniques were easily learnt and wages in this trade were low by comparison with stone carving. Of his five known apprentices and assistants, two later started independent businesses. James Hoskins, who was taken apprentice by Cheere in 1747, became ‘moulder and caster in plaster’ at the newly founded Royal Academy in 1769 and in 1774 formed a partnership with another former apprentice, Benjamin Grant. They supplied plaster casts to the firm of Wedgwood and Bentley. The others, of whom nothing is known, were John Fulford, Richard Breach and John Candy, all listed as Cheere’s apprentices in the London Evening Post on 10-12 December 1751 when they testified to the efficacy of a cure for William Collins’s ulcerous leg.
Cheere died a wealthy man and was buried in his brother’s vault in Clapham. His profits had been converted into leases and freeholds of 15 properties in the City and Westminster and he left cash bequests of over £5,000 of which £900 was earmarked for charitable causes. Charles Cheere inherited the entire contents of the yards, shop and showrooms in Piccadilly and offered the Royal Academy the choice of his uncle’s casts. They selected a St Susanna. The residue went to auction in 1788 and were bought by ‘a man from the Borough [of Southwark]’. At a second sale in 1812, the brewer, Samuel Whitbread, bought 20 statues for £975, 15 of which went to his gardens at Southill, Beds (78). A copy of Cheere’s statue of Shakespeare, commissioned by David Garrick for the Jubilee of 1769, was presented by Whitbread to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (73).
Cheere’s works were largely derivative, depending on models by other sculptors, but he in turn gave an impetus to the ceramics trade, who reproduced his more popular figures as statuettes (51, 57). His response to market trends and his attention to quality made him the most successful of the lead-figure men and brought a new refinement to the genre.
Only convincingly-argued attributions have been included in the list below. See also William Cheere.
Moira Fulton/IR
Literary References: GM 1768, 349; Smith II, 1828, 285; Webb 1951 (3), 54-56; Webb 1957 (3), 115-9; Webb 1958 (2), 232-40; Phillips 1964 ,76-7, 271; Gunnis 1968, 99-100, 123; Clifford and Friedman 1974; Avery 1974, 551-3; Kenworthy-Browne 1983,44; Rococo 1984, E6; Cruft 1984, 285-301; Afonso and Delaforce 1986, 16, 17, 36; Davis 1991, 31-2, 52-61, 370 n156; Clifford 1992, 40, 58-9, 65; Kenworthy-Browne 1993 248-52; Craske 1992, 32; Fulton 2001; Fulton 2003, 21-39; Neto and Grilo 2006, 5-18
Archival References: Blair Castle, misc tradesmen’s accounts, bundle 55, Cheere bills (Fulton 2001, appendix A 7-14); Croome, F60/13 (Fulton 2001, appendix A, 15-19); WCA PR, St George, Hanover Square, November 1737, WCA, C 127; Hoare Private Accounts 1734-49, 1750-66; Walton/Dunn Accts Burton C, 1764; GPC
Wills: PROB 11/1155 fol 314 (Fulton 2001, appendix F); Henry Cheere’s will, PROB 11, 1073
Miscellaneous Drawings: Hercules, sketch, Burton Constable 1609
Auction Catalogue: Cheere 1788
Artist’s impression of Cheere’s yard (?): William Hogarth, An Analysis of Beauty, 1753, pl 1 (with illustrations of Venus de’ Medici, Belvedere Antinous, Farnese Hercules, Apollo Belvedere, Sphinx)