Jacques Barthélémy Delamarre

Jacques Barthélémy Delamarre was a painter active in Paris in the last quarter of the 18th century into the early 19th century. The only firm biographical anchor in the current record is his admission to the Academie de Saint-Luc, the Paris painters' guild, in 1777. No source located gives a birth date, birth place, death date, or death place, and no source states directly whether he should be considered living or deceased; every reference treats him as a historical, 18th-century figure, but that is inference rather than a documented record.

His surviving known work centers on small-scale animal portraiture, most notably paintings of a small dog said to be "Pompon," a pet associated with Marie Antoinette. Auction and dealer listings render his name in variant forms, including "Delamarre Jacques-Barthelemy" (surname first, in the French catalogue convention) and "Jacques Barthelemy Delamarre" (given name first, the form generally used in English-language auction reporting). He should not be confused with the 20th-century sculptor Raymond Delamarre, the classical scholar Jean-Jacques Barthelemy, or the landscape painter Adolphe Appian (born Jacques Barthelemy Appian), all of whom share part of the name but have no documented connection to this painter.

No exhibition history and no commentary from a named art critic in a major outlet has been located for Delamarre. What public attention exists follows directly from the 2023 Sotheby's sale and the market press that covered it, rather than from art-historical scholarship, museum programming, or a monograph. That absence is itself part of the current picture of the artist: he is known through the market, not through the critical literature.

Delamarre's auction record is Portrait of a Small Poodle, Said to Be "Pompon," a Beloved Dog of Marie Antoinette, an oil on canvas that sold for USD 279,400 including buyer's premium at Sotheby's New York, in the Master Paintings Part II sale of 26 May 2023. The result was reported at roughly 56 times its USD 5,000 high estimate, and press coverage at the time described it as a new high for the artist. The same painting carries an earlier recorded appearance at Bonhams, London, on 16 February 1986 (lot 725), where it was catalogued under the variant spelling "De Lamarre." Beyond these two transactions, no broader trading history is documented in public auction records, so the market for this artist should be read as thin and concentrated around one exceptional result rather than a consistent price curve.

Delamarre's documentation is unusually sparse even by the standards of minor 18th-century painters. There is no catalogue raisonne, no confirmed gallery or estate representation, and no museum collection holding has been identified in the available sources. Attribution currently rests on auction-house cataloguing and specialist dealer research rather than on an established scholarly apparatus, and the name appears in more than one word order across catalogues, which matters when tracing provenance or searching sale databases. Collectors should treat the single headline 2023 result as evidence of demand for a specific, well-provenanced subject rather than as proof of a broad, liquid market for the artist's work generally.