John Milton

For this terracotta, Rysbrack copied the bust on his marble monument to the great 17th-century poet and writer in the so-called Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey—where memorials to Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Charles Dickens are also located. For the portrait, Rysbrack depended on a lifetime engraving of Milton made in 1670 for the frontispiece to his History of Britain.