Shepherdess
John Cheere (London 1709 – London 1787)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
circa 1755
Materials
Lead
Measurements
1760 x 420 x 420 mm
Place of origin
London
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 515121
Summary
Lead, shepherdess, John Cheere (London 1709 - London 1787), mid-18th century. A lead statue of a shepherdess cast by John Cheere, London, in a pair with NT 515120, a shepherd. The shepherdess standing in contrapposto with proper right leg leading, proper right hand holding crook and proper left hand on hip. The figure looks out to proper left with mouth gently open. She wears a wide-brimmed hat cocked to proper left, a ruffled blouse, a corset fastened in a bow under the breasts, a full skirt, and buckled heeled shoes. The statue was painted grey by the National Trust. Mounted on a stone pedestal. Originally mounted in the Rose Garden of Anglesey Abbey.
Full description
John Cheere is known to have produced casts of the shepherd and shepherdess from at least 1755, when a pair was sent to Portugal within the vast commission for the Palace of Queluz (see Neto and Grilo 2006 for a full account). A price list in Lisbon’s Arquivo Torre do Tombo records that of the 57 individual figures supplied by Cheere, up to nine configurations of the shepherd and shepherdess model were available, priced at £14.14.0, and assembled with different, separately-cast attributes like rakes, scythes, pitchforks, birds’ nests and accordions. As lead casts were piece-moulded, Cheere was free to adapt models of stock figures, moving the positions of arms and legs, and creating different attitudes and attributes, such as crooks in the classic shepherd and shepherdess type (of which this pair is an example), rakes (as in the ‘haymakers’, reproduced Davis 1991, p. 63, a pair bought by the Duke of Atholl for Blair Castle in 1755), a hoe (as in the ‘gardener’, an example of the male figure at Fenton House, NT 1448960.1, the pendant female figure now departed), and bundles of fruit (as in the ‘fruit pickers’, examples in the Temperate House at Kew and reproduced Davis 1991, p. 65, with original ‘life-like’ paintwork). A version of the shepherdess holding a lamb to her thigh was also available, adapted by Cheere from existing models made by his predecessors John Nost I (d. 1710) and Andrew Carpenter (d. 1737); see, for example, NT 515124 at Anglesey Abbey. The display of sculptures like the shepherd and shepherdess was a way of expressing elements of the rococo, the dominant style in mid-eighteenth-century decorative art, in the English town and country garden. Rustic, genre or contemporary figures, often vividly painted and posed to contrive playful or amorous associations, became increasingly popular from about 1730, reflecting rococo tendencies towards the informal, the pastoral and romantic. Moving away from the grandeur of classical or allegorical sculpture, mid-eighteenth-century garden statuary expressed the light-hearted idealism seen in other forms of rococo such as the Arcadian fêtes galantes of Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), the eroticised pastorals of François Boucher (1703-770) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), and in porcelain figures from the Nymphenburg, Meissen, Chelsea, and Bow factories. Further examples of lead statuary by John Cheere at Anglesey Abbey are the Lion and Lioness (NT 515157-515158), Minerva (NT 515130), Diana and Apollo (NT 515159-515160, identical to the pair at Queluz), the Grecian sphinxes (NT 515156.1 and 515156.2), The Olympian Courtship (NT 515135, identical to the group at Queluz), and Samson slaying the Philistine (NT 515133). Alice Rylance-Watson 2019
Provenance
Purchased by Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) from Thomas Crowther & Son, 14 January 1937, £300, with NT 515120 (Shepherd) and a stone sundial; bequeathed to the National Trust by Lord Fairhaven with the house and the rest of the contents.
Credit line
Anglesey Abbey, The Fairhaven Collection (The National Trust)
Makers and roles
John Cheere (London 1709 – London 1787), sculptor
References
Neto and Grilo 2006: Maria João Neto and Fernando Grilo, 'John Cheere's lead garden statues workshop and the important commissions of Prince Pedro of Portugal in 1755-56', Sculpture Journal, vol. 15.1 (2006), pp. 5-18. Davis 1991: John Davis, Antique Garden Ornament, 300 years of creativity: Artists, manufacturers & materials, Woodbridge 1991, pp. 58-65. Symes 1991, 2005: Michael Symes, The English Rococo Garden, Shire Library, Oxford and New York 1991, 2005, pp. 17-22. Roper 1964: Lanning Roper, The Gardens of Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire. The Home of Lord Fairhaven, London 1964, p. 62, pl. 35a. Christie, Manson & Woods 1971: The National Trust, Anglesey Abbey, Cambridge. Inventory: Furniture, Textiles, Porcelain, Bronzes, Sculpture and Garden Ornaments’, 1971, p. 158.