Details of Sculptor

Surname

Cavalier

Alternative Surname

First Name

Jean

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

?c1660

Flourished

Year of Death

1699

Biographical Details

Cavalier worked as an ivory-carver, medallist and wax-modeller, three related crafts, since the preliminary step for an ivory or metal relief was a model in wax. He is thought to have come from Dieppe, an established centre for the craft of ivory-carving and a port used by French Protestants fleeing to England to avoid Catholic persecution. He can probably be identified with John Cavalier, whose name is listed among the denizations of Huguenots in London on 16 May 1683.
His first known English ivories are signed and dated 1684. An uncomfortable head and shoulders portrait of Isabella, Duchess of Grafton, a daughter-in-law of Charles II, presents her face in profile and her upper torso from a three-quarters viewpoint, though there is no indication of torsion in the neck (1). The relief of Charles II on horseback, an image derived from the Great Seal, is entirely in profile, but for a slight turn of the horse’s head (2). This is Cavalier’s most ambitious known composition in an oeuvre otherwise devoted to small portrait medallions. The King is presented in finely-detailed classical armour and a cloak, holding a baton in his outstretched right hand in the manner of Antique equestrian statues. The horse is caparisoned in an elaborately embroidered saddle-cloth and walks among grassy hillocks past the trunk of a gnarled oak. On the verso is a delicately chiselled tree and a flower.
English subjects included aristocrats and luminaries such as the Principal Painter, Sir Godfrey Kneller (10) and the diarist, Samuel Pepys (4), as well as King William III and his wife Mary, both of whom were represented at least twice (3, 7). In the portrait of Queen Mary, his only surviving female portrait other than the Grafton, Cavalier again uses shifting perspective to display a strong profile and rounded, lightly covered breasts. The male portraits are treated in a dry, linear manner similar to contemporary medals, and Cavalier sometimes adds an upper case inscription round the border in the manner of a medal (4, 7).
He was appointed Medallist in Ordinary to Charles II in 1684, an appointment confirmed by William III in 1690, when a letter signed on the King’s behalf gave ‘le Sieur Jean Cavalier Notre Medalliste a Pais Estrangers’ permission to travel abroad (PRO. S P Dom Warrant Book 35, 497, 11 December 1690, quoted in Julius 1926, Bil A). He spent a period in Germany and then Denmark, where in 1693 he carved another profile in ivory with an inscription round the rim, a portrait of Ulrich Frederick, Count Guldenlowe (VAM A.8-1928). In 1694 he joined the Swedish Court and it was on a diplomatic mission from Sweden to Russia and Persia that he died in Isfahan, Persia, in May 1699. Four of his portrait medallions in wax of European aristocrats are known to have survived.
Cavalier was the only well-known ivory-carver working in late Stuart England before the arrival, c1695, of David le Marchand, who injected new vitality and plasticity into the craft. The cost of the material and inevitable restrictions in size meant that ivories only ever appealed to a small market as cabinet-pieces. Several 18th-century sculptors, known principally for their work in marble, carved a few pieces, among them, Peter Scheemakers and Peter Turnerelli. Gaspar van der Hagen specialised in ivory carving in the middle decades of the century. In the 19th century Benjamin Chesterton and particularly Richard Cockle Lucas revived an interest in ivories, prompted perhaps by the renewed enthusiasm for medieval art. In the later-18th century the wax modeller Isaac Gosset discovered a composition that he claimed imitated ivory and reproduced inexpensive likenesses in the material.
IR
Literary References: Julius 1926; Rasmussen 1948, 159-63, 191; Pyke 1973, 25-6; Friedman 1981 (2), 4-13; Theuerkauff 1984, 29-33; Murdoch and Hebditch 1985, 205-7; Avery 1996, 15-15, 51; Grove 6, 101 (Friedman); Gibson 1998, 164