Laurent Delvaux

Laurent Delvaux (1696, Ghent – 24 February 1778, Nivelles) was a Flemish sculptor. After a successful international career that brought him to London and Rome, he returned to the Austrian Netherlands where he was a sculptor to the court. Delvaux was a transitional figure between the Baroque and Neo-classicism.

Delvaux probably trained in his native Ghent under the local sculptor J. B. van Helderberghe. At the age of 18 he went to Brussels to study under Pierre-Denis Plumier from Antwerp and attended the local drawing academy.

He went to London in 1717 where he collaborated with his compatriot Peter Scheemakers. When they were joined by Plumier in 1721 they worked together on a number of marble funerary monuments, including that of John Sheffield, duke of Buckingham (1721–22, London, Westminster Abbey). After Plumier died soon after his arrival in 1721, Delvaux and Scheemakers are believed to have collaborated with Francis Bird on the marble monument to John Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle, also in Westminster Abbey. Scheemakers and Delvaux entered into a formal partnership and set up a workshop in Millbank, Westminster, in 1723. Their workshop produced many sober classical monuments and garden statuary after the Antique. The partners sold their stock in the partnership and travelled to Rome in 1728.

In Rome, Delvaux studied the work of compatriots Giambologna and François Duquesnoy as well as Italian sculpture of the 17th century and of his contemporaries. He keenly admired the sculpture of Classical antiquity and took the opportunity to copy newly discovered pieces. While in Rome, John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford, commissioned a number of works inspired by antique examples, most notably Biblis and Caunus.

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