John De Vaere
John De Vaere (De Vacre, De Vaare, Davaere) worked in England as a modeller and carver for more than 20 years. He appears to have been born in France and attended the Royal Academy Schools in 1786, giving the date of his birth as 10 March 1755.
In 1787 he was sent to Rome by Josiah Wedgwood to make models from the Antique under the supervision of John Flaxman RA. On 16 June 1787, shortly before their departure, Wedgwood wrote to Sir William Hamilton telling him that Flaxman ‘has promised to employ for me all the time he can spare at Rome, and to superintend a modeller [De Vaere], who I have engaged to accompany him and to employ the whole of his time for me at Rome’ (Finer and Savage, 1967, 307). De Vaere was set to work making a model of the Borghese vase relief and on 15 November 1788, Flaxman duly reported back to Wedgwood’s partner, Byerly: ‘Mr. De-veare has been at work with the utmost diligence ever since he has been here on the bas relief of the Borghese Vase in which he has succeeded very well, but it will still take him some weeks to finish and after he has done, I also shall have something to do to it, Mr. Wedgwood will easily conceive as this is new work to Mr. D. he must needs be slow at first especially as he takes so much pains. As a proof he follows his studies well he has already gained the Pope's first silver medal for a figure modelled at night in the Roman Academy’ (Flaxman/Byerly quoted by Constable 1927, 110-11, n 4). De Vaere copied other reliefs in the Roman collections and designed plaques with Homeric and other classical themes, and he modelled the entire Borghese vase in miniature, apparently on his own initiative (16).
After his return to England in 1790, De Vaere worked for Wedgwood at Etruria, where in 1794 he succeeded Henry Webber as a senior modeller. His prefered method was to work in red or white wax on a slate ground in low or medium relief. He left the firm after Wedgwood’s death in 1795 and moved to the Coade workshop where in 1797 he modelled a large overdoor group of emblematical figures, cast for the Pelican Life Insurance Office in Lombard Street (10). It features a standing representative of the company in the guise of a near-naked Roman centurion, who holds laurel wreaths above three distraught women, presumably widows being told their claims will be met. The tableau was illustrated in the European Magazine above an article on the Pelican Insurance Company, which described the sculpture as ‘very strking and beautiful ... the recumbent figure at the east end has been particularly admired for its graceful attitude and anatomical correctness’ (Euro Mag, vol 39, 1801, 262-4). The design was used as the frontispiece of the Coade Gallery Handbook in 1799. His independent work was also on occasion translated to Coadestone: a tall candelabrum for a John Jarrett of Freemantle, described by Mrs Coade as ‘a most exquisite piece of workmanship from the marble designed and executed by Mr. De Vaere’, was described as being on offer in the Coade Gallery within a year of its execution in marble.
De Vaere exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1798 (17), giving his address as 14 Cleveland Street. By 1800, the year he seems to have set up by himself, he had moved to 4 Pedlar's Acre, Lambeth, at or near the Coade workshop During the next decade he signed a number of memorial tablets. Perhaps he failed to prosper for in 1810, shortly after joining a lodge of freemasons in London, he left England for Flanders, where he was appointed Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy of Ghent. He died at Tronchinnet-les-Grand in 1830.
