Details of Sculptor

Surname

le Marchand

Alternative Surname

First Name

David

Initial of Surname

l

Year of Birth/Baptism

1674

Flourished

Year of Death

1726

Biographical Details

Le Marchand was a Huguenot immigrant who made his living by ivory carving, a craft for which his native city of Dieppe was renowned. He was born on 12 October 1674, the son of Guillaume Le Marchand, a painter of altarpieces, and Madeleine Levasseur. One of his brothers, Guillaume, became a painter and other family members are thought to have worked in ivory.
His early life is undocumented, but two signed portrait reliefs which may be his work survive from the years before he came to Britain. These are a fluent, three-quarter-face image of Sebastien, Maréchal de Vaubon, signed ‘Le Marchand Fecit. Anno 1689’, at which date the sculptor was only 15, and an undated low-relief profile head of King Louis XIV, signed ‘D.L.M.F’. Charles Avery, whose publications provide the principal source for Le Marchand’s work, has suggested that the royal medallion may be a specimen of his carving taken into exile as evidence of his capabilities (Avery 1996, 52).
Le Marchand is thought to have been one of the Huguenots who fled from Dieppe after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Alternatively, he may have escaped in 1694, when the Anglo-Dutch fleet fired the city. His presence in Britain is first recorded in February 1696, when he was given permission to practise his craft and open a shop in Edinburgh, provided he took on children of local burghers as apprentices. The first known, indubitably signed portrait medallion, of Sir James Mackenzie, is dated 1696 (23), and a miniature portrait bust and three low-relief portraits of other Mackenzie family members were carved before 1700 (32, 34, 35). The sculptor’s Protestant background was evidently not important to his clients, for other patrons included members of the Jacobite Drummond family (24, 27, 33), as well as the Earl of Leven, a protestant supporter of William III (26, 30). With the exception of one miniature bust (7) and the allegorical scene thought to celebrate the birth of the Old Pretender (22), all Le Marchand’s Scottish works are small reliefs, carved from thin plaques of ivory, which may have been all that was available to him in Edinburgh.
He probably arrived in England c1700, soon after the death of Jean Cavalier, who had perhaps brought the courtly continental fashion for ivory carving to England and had created a metropolitan market for ivory portrait reliefs in the late-17th century. Le Marchand’s movements in London are difficult to follow because of his relatively common French surname: a ‘David lemarchant’ was entered in the parish register of the French church in Swallow Street on 27 May 1705 as godfather to the daughter of Alexandre Sigournay, a cobbler of Newport Alley. The name appeared again in October 1709 in the oath roll of naturalizations, King’s Bench list, which granted British citizenship to immigrants. A later record provides firm evidence of Le Marchand’s whereabouts in the autumn of 1721: Edward, Lord Harley jotted in a pocket-book that Le Marchand ‘Frenchman Merchant carver in Ivory [was to be found] in Barthol lane behind the Royal Exchange’ (BL Add. MS.70456).
Le Marchand carved a few mythological or religious statuettes (1-6) but portraiture was his speciality. His talent for capturing the essence of his sitters in a rare material quickly brought him to the attention of the leaders of London society. These included members of the court and nobility, businessmen and particularly intellectuals at the forefront of science and literature. As his reputation grew he pioneered the use of much thicker plaques of ivory for his oval profile medallions, so that the head and shoulders projected to almost half their natural depth at the scale to which he was working. He also experimented successfully with full-face portrait reliefs, with shoulders cut almost to the waist (44, 45, 49, 52, 65-67, 75). The dominant character of each sitter is forcefully emphasised by frontal presentation and the lavish slice of ivory gave an opportunity to exhibit skills in realising the varied textures of a heavy curled wig, the fluid lines of a lawn shirt and particularly the quality of skin. The relief of Sir Isaac Newton (44), which succeeds in conveying both abstraction and piercing intelligence, was carved after a sitting from Newton and was considered by George Vertue to be the best of Le Marchand’s four images of the astronomer. Sir John Houblon, Governor of the Bank of England (45) looks out from a voluminous wig with a direct, unflinching expression, and the determined character of Thomas Guy (75), businessman and founder of a London hospital, is evident from the drawn brows, thin-lips and heavy jowls of his portrait.
Le Marchand’s most adventurous departure was a series of busts carved from the cylinder of a tusk, which gave him the opportunity to create a fully three-dimensional representation. He introduced the latest European stylistic fashions for these costly commissions. Two portraits of unidentified aristocrats, dated 1700 and 1701, (9, 10) are his first known large busts, each about 15 cm high. The man is wigged, but garbed all'antica, a representational compromise that paid lip-service to the fashionable interest in the classical world without obscuring the identity of the sitter. The woman’s image is ground-breaking: her direct gaze challenges the coy femininity expected of female portraits, and satisfying contrasts are provided by her near-diaphanous chemise and crisply curled locks falling onto the bare flesh of her shoulder. Another innovative bust, of an unidentified nobleman, measures 23.5cm in height and was carved from a whole cylinder of ivory (13). The unbuttoned coat and open-necked shirt give a casual air, pre-figuring the rococo movement in England. Le Marchand exploited eye-catching realistic details like twin button-holes, but the salient feature of the portrait is the stern, unflinching gaze, made emphatic by a severe downturn of the mouth.
The sculptor counted the Duke of Marlborough’s family among his aristocratic patrons and carved three busts of Marlborough’s daughter, Anne Churchill, Countess of Sutherland, around the time of her marriage in 1699 (8). She was an acknowledged beauty and the opportunity to carve this image of femininity and youthful charm must have provided a welcome change from the grandiose representations which were his usual fare, as well as providing an endorsement from the most powerful family at Queen Anne’s Court. A charming relief plaque of a seated noblewoman with her daughter and a pet whippet, c1710 (41), is thought to represent Anne Sunderland and her child. The sculptor also carved an authoritative profile relief of the Duke (39).
Le Marchand’s most enthusiastic patrons came from a mercantile background: the Raper family were prosperous silk merchants, closely involved in the emerging institutions of the City of London, particularly the Bank of England. In the years 1716-20 Le Marchand carved a number of reliefs and busts for the Rapers, including three profile medallions of family members (58, 59, 62) and an ambitious rectangular full length portrait relief of young Mathew Raper III, standing in a library, demonstrating a geometrical proposition (60). Raper later became a mathematician, scholar and fellow of the Royal Society and was involved in the foundation of the British Museum, to which he presented a work by Le Marchand (20). The Rapers are thought to have commissioned the medallion portrait of Thomas Guy (75) and the only surviving religious narrative relief by the sculptor, The miracle of Christ healing the man with the withered hand (64). They were also almost certainly behind two of the sculptor’s masterpieces, busts of John Locke (19) and Sir Isaac Newton (52). The Locke, which is now lost, was a posthumous representation owing superficial debts to Sir Godfrey Kneller's portrait, but Le Marchand’s interpretation had greater conviction, for it conveyed the physical frailty of the sitter, evident in the deep-set eyes and lines about the mouth. By contrast, Newton’s head is a forceful image taken from the life, which makes full play of the sitter’s features, a square skull, receding hairline, strong jaw and wide-set eyes. When the Rapers commissioned Le Marchand’s portrait by Joseph Highmore, c1723, the sculptor chose to be represented with this or another wigless head of Newton on the table before him.
Where possible Le Marchand is thought to have prepared a wax model from the life, which was then translated to ivory on the premises. The privilege of a personal sitting was recorded with the words ad vivum, sometimes in abbreviated form, added to the sculptor’s initials on the back of the work. Le Marchand’s images of famous men were rare or unique contemporary, three-dimensional records, and Avery has suggested that they, or wax impressions of them, were an important influence on sculptors of the next generation (Avery 1999, 33-4). He believes that Le Marchand’s busts of Locke and Newton were a source for G-B Guelfi’s heads of worthies for Queen Caroline's Hermitage, 1732, and that Michael Rysbrack’s bust of Newton for John Conduitt, c1727-30, has affinities with a lost medallion by Le Marchand. Other definitive images, like the profile of Sir Christopher Wren (74) and of the antiquarian, William Stukeley, presented all'antica with a wreath circling his cropped head (73), were both later reproduced in bronze as commemorative medallions. The commercially-minded ceramic manufacturers Wedgwood and Bentley, clearly recognised the decorative value of Le Marchand’s portraits and acquired plaster moulds of at least three sitters (58, 59, 62), as well as some wax casts (28, 29, 31). At least one of his reliefs (59) was translated to vitreous paste, perhaps by the Scot, James Tassie.
Le Marchand’s commissions dwindled after 1720 and George Vertue’s assessment of the sculptor’s achievement, written in 1722, has perhaps a retrospective tone: ‘an Ingenious man for carving in Ivory ... has been many years in England. Done a vast number of heads from ye life in basso relief some statues in Ivory’ (Vertue III, 13). The sculptor died in poverty on 17 March 1726 at the French Hospital in London, at the expense of the charity. William Stukeley, whose relief portrait (73) is the last securely dated work by Le Marchand, noted the death of ‘the famous cutter in ivory Monsr. Marchand, who cut my profile’ (William Stukeley, Family Memoirs, June 1726, quoted by Avery 1985, 1564). His best-known successor as a carver of busts in ivory was Gaspar Van der Hagen.
Le Marchand’s portrait reliefs followed in the tradition of Cavalier, but they became increasingly less medallic and more sculptural and sensual during the course of his career. Avery, whose exhibition of Le Marchand’s work in 1996 brought the sculptor’s achievement into new focus, considers his ‘brilliantly characterised portraits’ to be among the most impressive ever carved in ivory.
IR
Literary References: Vertue II, 69-70; Hodgkinson 1965 (2), 29-32; Whinney 1971, 25-30; Murdoch and Hebditch 1985,208-12; Avery 1984, 113-118; Avery 1985, 1562-64; Grove 19, 1996, 130 (Avery); Avery 1996; Avery 1999, 27-34; Dawson 1999, 150-2
Additional MS Sources: Edward Harley, Corr and Papers, BL Add. MS.70456
Portraits of the Sculptor: self-portrait (?), c1710, ivory, private coll; Joseph Highmore, c1723, oil on canvas, NPG, 6142