A pair of sphinxes
after John Cheere (London 1709 – London 1787)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1801 - c. 1825
Materials
Bronzed earthenware
Measurements
270 x 155 x 360 mm
Place of origin
London
Order this imageCollection
Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire
NT 109024
Summary
Bronzed earthenware, a pair of Grecian sphinxes, after a model by John Cheere (1707-87), c.1801-25. A pair of Grecian sphinxes press-moulded in earthenware and bronzed. The sphinxes, half woman, half lioness, crouch on rectangular pedestals, with their forepaws extended and tails curled over their hindquarters. They wear headdresses, scaled breastplates and embroidered saddle blankets draped over their backs.
Full description
These ornaments derive from a popular model of saddled sphinx by John Cheere which has been adapted and reproduced in various media from the mid-18th century. The model is based on Egyptian-style stone sphinxes carved by Giovanni Battista Guelphi (1690/1-1736) for Lord Burlington (1694-1753) and William Kent’s (c. 1685-1748) iconic garden at Chiswick (Davis 1991, p. 95). Guelphi partly based his design on an antique sphinx known through the sculptor’s association with Burlington and another English nobleman, Thomas Fermor, 1st Earl of Pomfret (1698–8 July 1753), when all three were in Rome in 1718. Under the latter’s patronage Guelphi moved to England two years later, tasked with the restoration of a collection of antique marbles Thomas’s father, Baron Leominster, had purchased from the Earl of Arundel. It was during this time that he undertook the repair of a late Roman sphinx, and the carving of a modern pendant, which were later bequeathed to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, by the Countess Dowager Pomfret in 1755 (Penny 1992, III, 97). By the mid-1720s Guelphi was in the employ of Burlington and Kent, carving statues for the gardens of Burlington’s Palladian villa, Chiswick House. One of the first and most celebrated English landscape gardens, Chiswick was filled with sculptures symbolically evoking the atmosphere and appearance of an ancient Roman garden. Although sphinx ornament had little precedent in Britain, Burlington was a powerful arbiter of taste, and thus a pair of sphinxes, with headdresses modelled on the Pomfret marble and bodies on saddled sphinxes at Marly and Versailles (see Château de Versailles, inv.nos. INV.GRAV 384-5 and the marble pair by Houzeau and Lerambert of 1668, inv.nos. MR 3302-3), was produced for Chiswick. These were installed by 1728, appearing in Pieter Rysbrack’s view of the front of Chiswick House painted that year. In 1749, two decades later, a lead sphinx cast after Guelphi’s model was produced by John Cheere (1709-87), England’s leading manufacturer of sculpture in lead (Davis 1991, pp. 95-101; Barnard and Clark 1995, p. 110). The Burlington accounts record a payment to Cheere in February 1749 for ‘a sphynx in Lead’, the cast installed in the gardens of Chiswick House with its stone counterparts by 1753 (they appear in ‘A View of the Back Front of the House and part of the Garden of the Earl of Burlington at Chiswick’ after John Donowell, etching, first issued 1753, re-issued 1760-66, RCIN 701784.g, Royal Collection Trust). All three remain at Chiswick to this day. It is presumably from the moulds Cheere took in 1749 that subsequent lead copies of Guelphi’s sphinx – and Cheere’s variant models of it – were made. As casts were piece-moulded, variations in design could be achieved by altering parts of a mould in line with stylistic trends and a patron’s demands. Cheere supplied casts of the Chiswick Egyptian-style sphinx and at least two other types in a Grecian style. Copies of the former type were produced for Castle Hill, a Palladian estate designed under the guidance of Lord Burlington (Fulton 2003, p. 29), and for Temple Newsam, Hopetoun House and Saltram (NT 872412), the last two of these houses remodelled in the 1760s by Robert Adam (1728-92), a neoclassical architect with whom Cheere regularly collaborated. Cheere had supplied Adam with decorative statuary at Kedleston, and appears also to have done so at Syon, Osterley and Compton Verney. Copies of the Grecian-type sphinx are found at the last three of these houses, each remodelled by Adam in the 1760s (see Adam’s ink and wash design for the portico at Osterley, NT 771548, which incorporates Cheere’s saddled sphinxes as finial ornament). Whilst archival evidence cannot firmly connect Cheere to these casts, he is the documented supplier of similar sphinxes at Stourhead (1747), Blenheim Palace (1773), and Somerset House (1778). Un-itemised payments to the sculptor are recorded in the Duke of Northumberland’s account books in 1767 and 1769, when Adam was working on Syon, and also in Sir Francis Dashwood’s accounts, where a further pair of saddled Grecian sphinxes in lead, identical to those at Anglesey Abbey (NT 515156) and Compton Verney, are mounted in the gardens of West Wycombe Park (NT 807673). The model continued to be reproduced and adapted throughout the 18th century, with variations in headdress, harness and saddle to cater to changing tastes. In ceramic media, sphinxes were reproduced in artificial stone (see the Coade pair at Croome Court, NT 105011, and the 19th century pair by Austin & Seeley at Blickling Hall, NT 355656) and in small-scale decorative pottery to dress mantelpieces and tables and pediments, such as those at Kedleston (NT 109024). Hard-paste porcelain versions started to appear on the market from the 1770s, produced in Staffordshire by Wedgwood (inv.no. MAR.C.8-1912, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and 2389-1901, Victoria & Albert Museum, London) and in Plymouth by William Cookworthy (NT 584960). David Crashley, a London cast-maker, is understood to have supplied a prototype to Cookworthy (Wills 1982, p. 151), probably from a model by or after Cheere, who, in addition to manufacturing lead sculpture, was also producing small-scale ceramic and plaster versions of popular statues, sculptures and busts from the third quarter of the 18th century (see Friedman and Clifford 1974, pp. 17-22). Entries in the Wedgwood archives show that a selection of models of busts were purchased from Cheere in 1774 for reproduction in basaltware, so models for the sphinxes must also have been acquired from Cheere or from his competitors. The sphinxes at Kedleston are not impressed with a maker’s mark and are probably early 19th-century examples. They are not original to the house but are nonetheless typical of the kind of garniture that Robert Adam, who remodelled Kedleston in the 1760s, would have installed there. Alice Rylance-Watson January 2020
Provenance
On loan from the Curzon family before sale at Neales Attic Sale. Purchased by the National Trust in 2002 from Neales Attic Sale.
Credit line
Kedleston Hall, The Scarsdale Collection (acquired with the help of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and transferred to The National Trust in 1987)
Marks and inscriptions
n
Makers and roles
after John Cheere (London 1709 – London 1787), sculptor
References
Wills 1982: Geoffrey Wills, 'A Riddle of a Sphinx', Proceedings of the Wedgwood Society, no.11, London 1982, pp. 149-52 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 Poole 1986: Julia Poole, Plagiarism Personified? European Pottery and Porcelain Figures, exh.cat, venue: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 1986, p. 27, no. C14, pl. 14