Portrait bust of Joseph Addison
John Cheere (London 1709 – London 1787)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1750 - 1780
Materials
Plaster
Measurements
406 mm (Height); 279 mm (L)
Place of origin
London
Order this imageCollection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 565215
Summary
Sculpture, plaster; portrait of Joseph Addison (1672-1719); John Cheere (1709-1787); c. 1750-80. A medium-sized bronzed plaster bust of the English writer and politician, from the workshop of John Cheere. Busts of this size were made for display in libraries, where they would be placed atop tall bookshelves. as in the Library at the Argory,
Full description
A plaster bust of the writer and politician Joseph Addison (1672-1719), depicting the subject as a young man, wearing an embroidered jacket, open at the neck, over an undershirt, and a loose cloak around the shoulders. Addison is depicted without a wig, looking to his left, his expression alert. Mounted on a rectangular tapered base, with a cartouche panel in the centre front. Patinated to give the effect of bronze. This portrait bust is an idealised representation of the English poet, essayist and politican Joseph Addison, celebrated as one of the founders, with Richard Steele (1672-1729), of the journal 'The Spectator'. The son of a clergyman, Addison began his career as a poet. After undertaking a Grand Tour, he continued to advance his career in London in the literary world, but also entered government service and became a member of Parliament. Between 1708-10 Addison lived in Ireland, having been appointed secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland and then being elected as member for Cavan in the Irish House of Commons. During his time in Ireland, Addison visited his friend Jonathan Swift at Laracor, near Belfast Lough. On his return to London in 1710, Addison at first found himself out of government, although he would return to office with the death of Queen Anne and the accession of King George I. However it was during his final decade that his literary career really took off, with him contributing to journals, notably the Spectator, and writing a successful drama, Cato. Addison’s reputation remained high throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as one of the greatest and most elegant masters of the English language. This helps to explain why he was included among the great writers whose image was disseminated throughout the eighteenth century through prints and through the sculpted portraits, produced in enormous numbers in the workshop of John Cheere. John Cheere was the younger brother of the sculptor Sir Henry Cheere (1703-81), who ran a significant business in monuments, statues and chimneypieces, employing numerous assistants. John began his working life as a haberdasher, but by the later 1730s he had joined his brother, developing a thriving business run from workshops at Hyde Park Corner. During the 1740s and 1750s John Cheere became the dominant figure in the manufacture of high-quality lead figures, often for display in gardens. Many survive in the collections of the National Trust. In their 1766 play The Clandestine Marriage, David Garrick and George Colman had one character exclaim that ‘You have as many rich figures as the man at Hyde Park Corner.’ (For Cheere, see Friedman and Clifford 1974). Among the workshop’s most successful smaller products were busts and statues of famous architects, artists and writers, most of whom worked in Britain, which were sold in lead or cheaper plaster versions. Cheere was here responding to the eighteenth-century fashion for series of sculptures celebrating national achievement, seen perhaps in its most famous form in the series of busts that adorn William Kent’s Temple of British Worthies at Stowe, created in c. 1734-35. Among the busts at Stowe are William Shakespeare and John Milton, but the series also includes monarchs such as Elizabeth I and parliamentarians, for example John Hampden. Cheere’s series of busts, like his modest-sized statuettes, was clearly designed for use in libraries and similar spaces for intellectual thought, so the selection of subjects is more focussed on the arts. Subjects included writers from the ancient world such as Aristotle, Cicero and Horace, but mostly more recent writers in English, among them William Congreve, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Matthew Prior and Jonathan Swift. The most extensive surviving series of these busts is the set of nine now in York City Art Gallery, acquired in 1950 from the sale of Kirkleatham Hospital Museum, together with ten of Cheere’s statuettes of famous luminaries. The York busts depict Cicero, Horace, Addison, Francis Bacon, Dr Samuel Clark, Congreve, Dryden, Prior and Swift, and they have the name of the subjects inscribed in the cartouche on the front of the busts. Like many other of Cheere’s productions, including the bust at the Argory, they were patinated in a dark brown colour to give the appearance, at least when high up atop library shelves, that they were made from the much more expensive material bronze. The busts would have generally been sold as sets for use in libraries, like the sixteen bronzed plaster busts from an anonymous workshop at Belton House (NT 436763), installed in around 1734. John Cheere’s portrait of Addison depicts the subject without a wig, no doubt to enhance the sense of a writer at work in his private study. It is possibly based on a lost image of the writer, for example the one that Louis François Roubiliac (1702-1766) is known to have made, but the face of Addison in the bust may in any event be taken from a print published in 1748 by Jacob Houbraken (1698-1780) after the painted portrait by Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), in which Addison is shown bewigged. As well as the example in York, there are two more versions of the Cheere bust in National Trust collections, a slightly larger one at Stourhead (NT 732898) and an unpatinated one at the Vyne (NT 719582; one of an extensive series of library busts at the house which are however later in date, from around 1800). A lead version was one of four busts formerly at Heywood House, Ballinakill, Co. Laois, destroyed by fire in 1950, and another in plaster was sold at auction (Christie’s South Kensington, Peter Hone sale, 26 October 2016, lot 113). A slightly larger variant bust is one of 24 portrait busts supplied by Cheere for the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge some time between 1753 and 1763. Cheere’s bust was further widely disseminated in ceramic versions, made in a number of factories, including Staffordshire, Derby and Wedgwood and Bentley. Jeremy Warren July 2022
Provenance
Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), by whom given to the National Trust in 1979.
Makers and roles
John Cheere (London 1709 – London 1787), sculptor
References
Friedman and Clifford 1974: Terry Friedman and Timothy Clifford, The Man at Hyde Park Corner. Sculpture by John Cheere 1709-1787, exh.cat., Temple Newsam, Leeds, and Marble Hill House, Twickenham, 1974, no. 62, pl. 15.