Peter Scheemakers

Peter Scheemakers or Pieter Scheemaeckers II or the Younger (1691 – 12 September 1781) was a Flemish sculptor who worked for most of his life in London. His public and church sculptures in a classicist style had an important influence on the development of modern sculpture in England.
Scheemakers is perhaps best known for executing the William Kent-designed memorial to William Shakespeare which was erected in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1740 as well as that to John Dryden in the same church.
Life.
He was born in Antwerp and followed in the footsteps of his father, the sculptor Pieter Scheemaeckers. He served his formal apprenticeship in Copenhagen in Denmark where he studied for four years with the court sculptor Johann Adam Sturmberg (1683–1741). 
In 1715 he allegedly walked from Copenhagen to Rome (over 1500km) where he studied both classical and baroque styles of sculpture. In 1716 he sailed to England and settled in London where he befriended Laurent Delvaux (who had also studied in Rome). He and Delvaux worked there with another Flemish sculptor Pieter-Denis Plumier on a funeral monument to John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, which they delivered in 1722 after the death of Plumier. Scheemakers and Delvaux entered into a formal partnership and set up a workshop in Millbank, south of Westminster in London, in 1723. Their workshop produced many sober classical monuments and garden statuary in the Antique style. The partners sold their stock in the partnership and travelled to Rome in 1728. Scheemakers stayed there for two years to study both antique and recent masterpieces. Upon his return to England in 1730 Scheemakers restarted the Millbank workshop (in St Martin's Lane) on his own. His 'ideal' classical sculptures became very popular with the landowning class and the city merchants. He moved his workshop a few times: first to Old Palace Yard in 1736 and then in 1740 to Vine Street, where he remained active until his retirement in 1771. On retiral he returned to Antwerp where he died at the age of 90.
He worked for a time with Francis Bird, and was the teacher of Henry Cheere and Charles Cope Trubshaw, amongst others. Joseph Nollekens joined his studio in 1747 and served his apprenticeship here, before leaving for Rome in 1762.
Scheemakers' brother, Henry Scheemakers, and his son, Thomas Scheemakers, were both also sculptors.
Works.
Westminster Abbey.
Fifteen of Scheemakers' works – monuments, figures and busts – are in Westminster Abbey. Two were executed in collaboration with his master, Delvaux: the “Hugh Chamberlen” (d. 1728, and therefore perhaps produced during his first visit to London); and “Catherine, Duchess of Buckinghamshire.” However, he is best known by his monument to William Shakespeare (1740), but, as this work was designed by Kent, the responsibility must not all be laid to Scheemakers' account. 
In addition to these, there are the monuments to Admiral Sir Charles Wager, Vice-Admiral Watson, Lt. General Percy Kirke, George Howe, 3rd Viscount Howe, General Monck, and Sir Henry Belasyse. His busts of John Dryden (1720) and Dr Richard Mead (1754), also in the Abbey, are noted examples of his smaller works. A memorial to Thomas Jordan was created in 1736, to Lord Aubrey Beauclerk in 1741, and to Admiral John Balchen in 1744.
Tombs by Scheemakers in the Abbey include Dr John Woodward (d.1728) and Magdalen Walsh (d.1747). The latter was relocated due to he placement of the Memorial to the Armed Forces in 2008.
Other Works in England.
1st and 2nd Dukes of Ancaster at Edenham, Lincolnshire; Lord Chancellor Hardwicke at Wimpole, Cambridgeshire; the Duke of Kent, his wives and daughters, at Flitton, Bedfordshire; the Earl of Shelburne, at Wycombe, Bucks; and the figure on the sarcophagus to Montague Sherrard Drake, at Amersham. Another example of his work is the memorial to Topham Foote (or Foot) in the parish church of St John the Baptist Church, Windsor. This burial monument, which includes the young man's bust and the Foote family crest, greets visitors in the main High Street entrance, just from the Henry VIII gate to Windsor Castle. There is also a memorial to Sir Thomas Reeve, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 1736-37 in the church. He also sculpted a memorial for the Petty family, marking the family burial place in All Saints' Parish Church, High Wycombe, which depicts the family in Roman dress.
Ireland.
In 1743, Mary Coghill erected the parish church of Clonturk (now Drumcondra Church) in memory of her brother Marmaduke Coghill, and placed in it a statue of her brother by Peter Scheemakers.
He also was the sculptor of fourteen of the busts in the Long Room of the Trinity College Library in Dublin, including James Ussher, William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Locke, Cicero, Homer, Aristotle and Socrates.
Trivia.
Between 1970 and 1993, an image of Scheemakers's Shakespeare statue appeared on the reverse of Series D £20 notes issued by the Bank of England. Alongside the statue was an engraving of the balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet".