Sunlight floods the dark interior revealing an almost sacred scene of adoration, renaissance and creative spirit. The red-haired Dutch sculptor Geerhart Janssen kneels reverentially before the luminous white marble figure of William Shakespeare in academic pose, his hands resting on a cushion—the right soon to hold a quill, the left atop a piece of parchment. Janssen is putting the finishing touches to a memorial sculpture while the elegantly dressed playwright Ben Johnson proffers the immortal bard’s death mask. Yet Janssen’s children seem oblivious to the drama being played out before them. The two ‘ginger’ innocents on the floor are lost in play with some of their father’s clay figures, while their older sibling leans languidly against the open timber door, chewing her left index finger and gazing distantly beyond the historic tableau. Outside a path leads down to a tree-lined riverbank and an écorché (a human figure with the skin removed to display the musculature) poses on the sill of a creeper-clad window, which frames the iconic view of the Avon and Holy Trinity’s elegant spire. On the wall behind the sculpture rests a model of the funerary monument, signed and dated 1857. This imaginary scene is a replica (39 × 53 cm) [1] of a much larger Wallis painting (whereabouts unknown) originally owned by Robert Platt (1802–82), a wealthy cotton manufacturer from Cheshire [2].
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