About the Artwork
This large and finely modeled porcelain sculpture of John Milton depicts the poet in seventeenth-century dress resting on a column that is molded with a relief of the Archangel Gabriel expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, a scene taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost. This rare model, by Richard Chaffers of Liverpool, was inspired by the slightly larger plaster example by the sculptor John Cheere (1709-87) of London, part of a series of great literary and artistic figures intended for display in libraries. Cheere’s sculpture, in turn, was based on the marble monument in Westminster Abbey, sculpted by Peter Scheemakers after a design by William Kent. The present example, formerly in the John Hewett collection in London, is the only figure of Milton known thus far by Richard Chaffers and Company of Liverpool.
Figure of John Milton
between 1760 and 1765
Richard Chaffers and Company
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English
Unknown
Soft-paste porcelain
Overall: 18 × 9 3/4 × 5 1/2 inches (45.7 × 24.8 × 14 cm)
Ceramics
European Sculpture and Dec Arts
Museum Purchase with funds from Stanford C. Stoddard in memory of Ann D. Stoddard
2003.83
This work is in the public domain.
Markings
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Provenance
1930-May 15, 1997, John Hewitt Collection. (Brian Haughton Antiques, London, England)
2003-present, purchase by the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, Michigan, USA)
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Provenance pageExhibition History
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The exhibition history of a number of objects in our collection only begins after their acquisition by the museum, and may reflect an incomplete record.
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Suggest FeedbackPublished References
Watney, B.M. Liverpool Porcelain of the Eighteenth Century. Shepton Beauchamp, 1997, p. 119 (fig. 470).
Darr, Alan. P. and Brian Gallagher. "Recent acquisitions (2000-2006) of European sculpture and decorative arts at The Detroit Institute of Arts." The Burlington Magazine 149, no. 1251 (June 2007): p. 452, pl. XI (ill.).
Darr, Alan P. "Virtuoso Carving: Three Eighteenth-Century British Portrait Sculptures by Le Marchand, Roubiliac, and Chaffers." Bulletin of the DIA 83, no. 1/4 (2009): pp. 46-47, (ill.) p. 46 (fig. 11).
Darr, Alan P. "Richard Chaffers's Porcelain Statuette of John Milton: A Culmination of Collecting Eighteenth-Century Porcelain Sculpture at the Detroit Institute of Arts." In The Man with the Butterfly Tie: Ceramics Essays in Honour of Brian Haughton, ed. Brian Haughton and Anna Haughton. Stuttgart, 2022, pp. 55-57 (ill.).
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Credit Line for Reproduction
Richard Chaffers and Company, Figure of John Milton, between 1760 and 1765, soft-paste porcelain. Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum Purchase with funds from Stanford C. Stoddard in memory of Ann D. Stoddard, 2003.83.
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