(1755 - 1830), designer and modeller; b. Ghent; RA Schools 1786 - ; working for Wedgwood from 1787.
1787 - 91 [Marseilles] Genoa, Rome (by 6 Oct. 1787 - May 1790)
Devaere was engaged by Josiah Wedgwood as a modeller to accompany Flaxman in Rome.1 He travelled with his wife, arriving in Rome 'about three weeks' before the Flaxmans, with whom they first stayed on the Corso,2 but in August 1788 the Devaeres were living on their own at 23 Piazza Mignanelli (close by the Flaxmans).3 Notes in a sketchbook by Devaere (Sotheby's, 16 Nov. 1989) show he had arrived in Rome by 6 October 1787 and they list prints and books acquired for his studies (as Godwyn's Hebrew and Roman Antiquities, Winckelmann's Monumenti Inediti and Storia delle Arti, Danet's Mythological Dictionary, and prints of works in the Farnesina and Museo Pio Clementino); the longest note (struck through) expresses Devaere's professional concerns and includes the statement: 'the reasons why I draw so viley are first I do not sufficiently consider the subject secondly that I do not endeavour to dispose of the drapery in the most elegant and graceful folds'.
Nevertheless in the spring of 1788 Devaere won 'the Pope's first silver medal for a figure modelled at night in the Roman Academy' and Flaxman, reporting this success to Wedgwood's assistant, Byerley, in November 1788, stated that Devaere had 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'.4 In December Devaere was finishing a bas relief for Wedgwood of the Rape of Proserpine after an antique in the Barberini Palace, and in his own time was making larger studies in clay of the principal figures; he was working on the casts from which he modelled the relief, and would send them and any others he managed to acquire to Wedgwood. Notes in his sketchbook indicate that on 21 April 1789 he began his second month of study in the Stanze of Raphael, and on 16 May he began work in the Loggie.
Wedgwood had received the casts by 11 February 1790, when he wrote to Flaxman confirming that Devaere's salary should be increased, and that he might be allowed to take up commissions on his own in Rome; he thanked Flaxman for advising Devaere on the choice of subjects to model, and he particularly admired Devaere's models of the Discovery of Achilles and the History of Orestes, although he found the nakedness of the figures somewhat objectionable. He added that Devaere might stay on in Rome. Devaere was still in Rome on 18 May 1790, when Flaxman paid him for a bust of Homer,5 and Wedgwood wrote to him on the Continent on 18 December 1791, congratulating him on making useful connections and asking him to give some money to the modeller Angelo Dalmazzoni.
1. See Wedgwood Letters, 307, 323 - 4. 2. Mrs Flaxman jnl.MSS 1, f.38v. 3. Add.39780, f.185 (Mrs Flaxman, 29 Aug. 1788). 4. See Constable, Flaxman, 110 - 12. 5. Flaxman acct.bk., Add.39784E, f.2.