Details of Sculptor

Surname

Delvaux

Alternative Surname

First Name

Laurent

Initial of Surname

D

Year of Birth/Baptism

1696

Flourished

Year of Death

1778

Biographical Details

Laurent Delvaux spent seven active years in England working principally with Peter Scheemakers, before embarking on a distinguished career in his homeland, the Southern Netherlands (now Belgium).
He was born in Ghent on 17 January 1696, the son of Godefroid Delvaux, a cornet in the Austrian cavalry and Françoise, née Chasselat, a supplier of provisions and a laundress working for her husband’s regiment. There were no sculptors in his immediate family. Delvaux trained in Ghent under an obscure master, Gery Helderenberg (1651-1739), and around 1713-14, joined the Brussels studio of Pierre-Denis Plumier. While Delvaux was with him, Plumier was involved in a wide range of commissions including monuments, statues, liturgical furnishings and a fountain with river gods for the Hotel de Ville.
Plumier took his workshop to London in or before 1720 and Delvaux joined him by 1721. There he met Scheemakers, who had recently joined Plumier’s team. Plumier died in 1721, shortly after winning the contract for the monument to John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham in Westminster Abbey (1), leaving Delvaux and Scheemakers to execute the commission from his design and models. Delvaux carved a dramatic personification of Time, poised on a bracket above effigies of the duke in Roman armour, and his kneeling duchess. The status of the client, Buckingham’s widow and the novel triangular composition guaranteed lively attention for the monument in the Post-Boy for 17-19 July 1722, and in several provincial newspapers.
George Vertue notes that Delvaux and Scheemakers both worked briefly for Francis Bird, but around 1723 they entered into an informal partnership together and from 1725 seem to have shared premises in Church Street, Millbank, Westminster, rated in ‘Mr Delmore’s’ name. Its nominal value, £30 10s in 1725, was high for the district and suggests a need for extensive work space. On 27 May 1726 Delvaux left London briefly to marry Plumier's widow, Madeleine (née Pauwels), at Sint Jacobskerk in Antwerp. She died soon after in childbirth and Delvaux informally adopted her two children by Plumier, one of whom, Pierre Plumier, later joined his workshop in Nivelles.
Delvaux and Scheemakers together received a number of commissions for garden sculpture, particularly for pairs of classical subjects, which gave them an opportunity to pit their relative skills. Delvaux’s colossal Hercules, 1722 (7), for Lord Castlemaine’s pleasure-grounds at Wanstead (teamed with an Omphale by Scheemakers) is a powerful, muscular figure. By contrast, the tender group of Vertumnus and Pomona (25) for the 1st Duke of Chandos at Canons (a pendant to Scheemakers’s Apollo and Venus) provided Delvaux with an early opportunity to explore a theme to which he would return in England, and later in Belgium, the subtle inter-action between pairs of figures. The partners also turned out a number of seductive, recumbent Venus statuettes, including one for the distinguished collector, Sir Andrew Fountaine (11, 13, 27).
Three commissions for monuments were executed in tandem during the 1720s. The wall-monument to Sir Thomas Grantham at Bicester (3), which was probably carved soon after the two sculptors joined forces, is a conservative work with a heavy, scrolled frame, a wigged medallion portrait and an apron carved with a winged skull. Two large standing monuments (2, 4) reflect an awareness of the growing enthusiasm amongst Whig patrons and grand tourists for a classical vocabulary. Each has an architectural frame enclosing effigies in classical dress. Payments for the Rockingham (2), which was designed by Scheemakers, were made to Delvaux and suggest that he acted as the controlling partner. Delvaux was responsible for both extant designs for the Ongley (4).
Delvaux is known to have worked alone on two commissions in the 1720s. Around 1724 he carved a formal, stolid figure of George I in the guise of a Roman Emperor, for a niche above the judicial bench in the Rolls House in Chancery Lane (8). A commission for four figures of the Seasons now at West Wycombe was evidently more congenial to the sculptor, for these are sensuous, confidently executed groups of seated nudes attended by rotund babies (21).
Throughout their partnership years, Delvaux and Scheemakers fought without success to break Michael Rysbrack’s market dominance. Rysbrack had not visited Rome, but the classical veneer on his sculpture had a wide appeal. In 1728 Delvaux and Scheemakers made a striking bid to attract attention by selling their entire stock, announcing on the title page of their sale catalogue their intention of ‘going to Italy’. Their decision was sufficiently noteworthy for Vertue to record that they were travelling south with an intention ‘to form & improve their studies’ (Vertue III, 36). Among the models sold at auction by Delvaux were several ideas for garden figures, which may have been executed, but of which there is no trace (6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 16-20, 22, 24, 35, 36).
The partners travelled south in August 1728, taking with them an introduction from Sir Andrew Fountaine to Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini. In Rome they took lodgings in the Palazzo Zuccari, near the Spanish Steps, and began their studies of antique and baroque sculpture. Corsini's influence helped Delvaux to forge contacts with the Papal Court and he was commissioned to carve two colossal angels for the basilica of the Royal Palace at Mafra, Portugal, as well as portrait busts of Pope Benedict XIII and of Corsini, after his election as Pope Clement XII. Delvaux also made several fine copies in marble of antiquities and of Bernini’s David (26, 29-33).
Scheemakers returned to London in 1730 leaving Delvaux, who was ‘well imployed’, in Rome (Vertue III, 44), though the partners had an outstanding commission in London which needed his attention. Before leaving for Italy they appear to have agreed to carve a monument in Westminster Abbey for the Duchess of Buckingham’s obstetrician, Dr Hugh Chamberlen (5). Scheemakers provided the design for a reclining effigy on a sarcophagus flanked by two standing Virtues, Hygeia and Longevity. Vertue records ‘one of the standing figures of Delvo. The others & ye statue of ye Dr. by Scheemaker’ (Vertue III, 53). Delvaux’s figure is probably Longevity, a statue notable for its airy draperies and gentle torsion. It is not known whether the figure was carved in London or sent over from Rome, but the monument was completed in 1731.
In 1732 Delvaux went to Brussels, taking with him a letter of recommendation from Pope Clement to the Habsburg regent of the Southern Netherlands, the Arch-Duchess Marie-Elisabeth. Shortly afterwards, on 28 January 1733, he was appointed her court sculptor, but in 1733 he also visited London for two months, taking with him a marble bust of Caracalla (40), ‘A fine and Just imitation… done by him at Rome’ (Vertue III, 66). Delvaux recorded in his Répertoire des Ventes, a notebook of business activities, a number of works left with Scheemakers to sell on commission. These were the copies of antiquities and five terracotta models (34). Through the good offices of John Sanderson, the Duke of Bedford's architect and a friend of Delvaux, Bedford bought the marbles in 1734. Sanderson bought the terracotta models and commissioned Delvaux’s portrait by Isaac Whood.
There is no evidence that Delvaux returned to England again but he retained links with London over the next decade. Notes in the Répertoire indicate that in 1738 he organised the passage of marbles ordered by Scheemakers and sent to London via the burgermaster of Ostend. In 1741 he was involved in a curious piece of business with the retired sea-captain, Thomas Coram, later founder of the London Foundling Hospital, to whom he sent ‘powder mill bluestones’ costing 54,000 florins. In 1744, the entrepreneurial plasterer William Wilton sent his son, Joseph Wilton, to be trained under Delvaux in Nivelles, where Wilton spent 53.5 days assisting with the oak pulpit for the Carmelite church. Wilton’s mature style combines naturalistic and classical elements in a manner similar to Delvaux’s.
Delvaux’s later career was highly sucessful. The Arch-Duchess was succeeded as Governor in 1750 by Duke Charles-Alexander, an active patron with a passionate desire to improve his palaces and gardens. Delvaux, hitherto known principally as a carver of devotional works, was re-appointed Court-sculptor and had a major hand in ornaments for the palaces. He died in Nivelles on 24 February 1778 and was seen posthumously as the reviver of a national school.
Despite the brevity of his London career, Delvaux's name was woven into the history of British sculpture. In 1749 Vertue named the four foreigners who had recently transformed the quality of the native product, Rysbrack, Scheemakers, Louis François Roubiliac and Delvaux, who ‘staid not long’ (Vertue III, 145-6). He was given a short entry in the first edition of Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting, with a portrait engraved by Hibbart after Whood. His craftsmanship was apparently still appreciated in the early-19th century, for when his vases for Wanstead (44) were auctioned in 1822, they fetched impressive sums, £80.17s and £78. 15s. Later critics have discussed his work principally in tandem with Scheemakers, drawing a distinction between Scheemakers’s stiff classicism and Delvaux’s animated and naturalistic carving.
IR
Literary References: Vertue III, 36, 44, 66,146; Anecdotes 1762-1771, IV, 100; Gunnis 1968, 126; Avery 1980, 150-70; Avery 1983, 253-64; Roscoe 1987, 1-10; Roscoe 1990, passim; Jacobs 1996, 71-90; Jacobs 1997, 58-66; Jacobs 1999 (1); Roscoe 1999,163-5, 173; Roscoe 2001, 106-8; ODNB (Roscoe)
Archival References: PR, St Margaret, Westminster, WCA E.344-348, E.352; L Delvaux, Repertoire des Ventes, 1734-42, coll Raymond Delvaux, Brussels
Auction Catalogues: Delvaux and Scheemakers 1728
Portraits of the Sculptor: Isaac Whood, Laurent Delvaux with his bust of Caracalla, canvas commissioned by John Sanderson, 1734, untraced; Alexander Vanhaecken, mezzotint after Whood's portrait (Jacobs 1999, frontispiece); I Wright, woodcut after Whood's portrait, (Anecdotes 1876, III, 41); G L Godecharle, bust, 1824, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (Jacobs 1999,14, repr)