Alexander Pope

This is one of many portrait busts produced within the lifetime of poet and translator Alexander Pope, the leading literary celebrity of his day. From his position of privilege and detachment from contemporary politics, Pope used his talents to satirize the increasingly materialistic world he inhabited.
Scheemakers had studied antique sculpture in Rome and rendered Pope, who was also a translator of Homer’s Iliad, in a classical form, equating the eighteenth-century writer with his Greek and Roman predecessors. Imitating classical forms in both literature and art was in keeping with the Augustan fashions of the day, which saw Britain’s colonial empire mirror the omnipotence of ancient Rome.