Sculptor. There is some uncertainty concerning his place of birth: although Gunnis stated in his Dictionary of British Sculptors (1951; rev. 1968) that De Vaere was born in Ghent, Roscoe, in her Biographical Dictionary (2009), wrote that he ‘appears to have been born in France’. Nevertheless, De Vaere signed his Monument to General McPherson (see below), ‘John Devaere Native of Ghent sculpsit 1809’. Originally surnamed De Vaare, he altered the spelling of his name to De Vaere (or ‘Devaere’) on moving to England. He entered the Royal Academy Schools on 30 January 1786 and gained employment with Josiah Wedgwood who in 1787 sent him to Rome to make models from the antique under the supervision of the sculptor John Flaxman. While in Rome, De Vaere assisted Flaxman on his group, The Fury of Athamas, 1790–94, now at Ickworth House, Suffolk. In a letter to Wedgwood, Flaxman wrote that De Vaere had ‘gained the Pope’s first silver medal for a figure modelled at night in the Roman Academy’. On his return to England in 1790, De Vaere worked at Wedgwood’s Etruria factory, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, succeeding Henry Webber in 1794 as chief modeller. Following Wedgwood’s death in 1795, De Vaere relocated to London to work at the Coade Factory, Lambeth, where in 1797 he designed and modelled a large overdoor group of six emblematic figures for the Pelican Life Insurance Office, Lombard Street, City of London. The work was considered a triumph. Engravings of it appeared on the frontispiece of the Coade’s Gallery Handbook of 1799 and, because it had ‘been much admired’, in a feature on the insurance company in the European Magazine (April 1801, pp. 263–64). Damaged by bombing during the Second World War, it was repaired and in 1956 relocated to the grounds of the Horniman Museum, Forest Hill, south London, where it was repeatedly vandalised; finally, in 2000, it was transferred to the Museum of London. By 1800 De Vaere had left Coade and set up independently, showing five pieces at the annual RA exhibitions between 1797 and 1809 and securing a number of commissions for church monuments. Most are simple tablets – e.g., to Mary, Countess of Kenmare (d.1806), St Giles-in-the-Fields, London, and to Edward Methuen Irby (d.1809), St Mary the Virgin, Whiston, Northamptonshire – although that to the American Revolutionary General John McPherson (shown at the RA, 1809) is rather more ambitious. A bas relief representation of the shipwreck of the ‘Rose in Bloom’, during which McPherson was drowned, it shows his daughter, Elizabeth, being lifted from the waves by a burly young man, both Elizabeth and her rescuer having been rendered bare-chested by the force of the waves. Intended for the Scots Presbyterian Church at Charleston, South Carolina, it was rejected because of the immodesty of the figures and later gifted to the Carolina Art Association; now in Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art, it is catalogued as The Wreck of the Rose in Bloom. Following the rejection of this work – and perhaps partly because of it – De Vaere seems to have given up trying to make a living as an independent sculptor and in 1810 moved to Flanders to take up the post of Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Ghent.
Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 378–80, 431; The Gibbes Museum of Art – Object Record: The Wreck of the Rose in Bloom; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1650–1851, London, [1951; rev. 1968], p. 128; A. Kelly, Mrs Coade’s Stone, Upton-upon-Severn, Worcs., 1990, pp. 47–48, 60, 185; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 363–64; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. xx–xxi.
Terry Cavanagh, 2007; revised August 2024
