SCHEEMAKERS, PETER (16911770)

This article appears in Volume V24, Page 315 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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SCHEEMAKERS, PETER (16911770) , Flemish sculptor, was born in Antwerp, and learnt his art from his father and from Delvaux. After visiting Denmark and walking thence to Rome for purposes of study, he returned on foot to the port of embareation for England, but stayed in London but a short while. From 1728 to 1735 he again sojourned in Rome and then settled in England, where he remained from 1735 to 1770, returning in the latter year to his native city where he died a few months afterwards. He worked for a time with Francis Bird, the pupil of Grinling Gibbons. Fifteen of his worksmonuments, figures and bustsare in Westminster Abbey, two executed in collaboration with his master Delvaux: the " Hugh Chamberlen " (d. 1728, and therefore perhaps produced during his first visit to London) and " Catherine, duchess of Buckinghamshire." He is best, though not most creditably, known to fame by his monument to Shakespeare (1740), but as this

work

WORK

was designed by Kent the blame for the errors of

taste

TASTE (from Lat. taxare, to touch sharply; tangere, to touch)

therein displayed must not be laid to Scheemakers' account. In addition to these may be mentioned the monuments to Admiral Sir Charles Wager, Vice-Admiral Watson, Lieut.-General

Percy

Kirk, George Lord Viscount Howe, General Monck, and Sir

Henry

Belasye. His busts of John Dryden (1720) and Dr Richard

Mead

(1754), also in the Abbey, are among the best of his smaller works. The most important of his monuments elsewhere, as mentioned by Walpole, are those to the 1st and 2nd dukes of Ancaster at Edenham, Lincolnshire; Lord Chancellor Hardwicke at Wimpole, Cambridgeshire; the duke of Kent, his wives and daughters, at Fletton, Bedfordshire; the

earl

EARL

of Shelburne, at Wycombe, Bucks; and the figure on the sarcophagus to Montague Sherrard Drake, at Amersham. Although less esteemed as an artist than Rysbrack and Roubiliac, Scheemakers was a very popular and widely-employed sculptor in his day, whose influence was considerable; he was the master of Nollekens, and left a son,

Thomas

Scheemakers, who produced
a considerable amount of

work

WORK

, and exhibited in the Royal

Academy

ACADEMY, GREEK
ACADEMY, ROYAL

from 17821804.
See Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, vol. 3 (ed. 1876), and ,Dictionary of National Biography.

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