Louis Félix Delarue

Louis Félix Delarue was born in Paris on 19 October 1730 and died in Paris on 24 June 1777, at age 46. He is often identified in dealer and auction sources as a brother of the sculptor Philibert-Benoit de La Rue, though sources disagree on which of the two siblings was older. He trained as a sculptor in the studio of Lambert-Sigisbert Adam, one of the leading French sculptors of the period.

He entered the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture as a sculpture student by 1749, and on 29 August 1750 he won the Academy's first prize in sculpture, the Prix de Rome, for a bas-relief on the subject "Abraham remercie Dieu de lui rendre Isaac." From 1 April 1752 to 22 September 1754 he held pensionnaire status at the Ecole royale des eleves proteges, an elite royally funded school for promising academy students, receiving his certificate on 3 September 1754. As part of his Prix de Rome award, he presented work before the king at Versailles in 1754, including a sculptural group titled "Bacchante qui enivre des enfants" and four bas-reliefs of the Seasons. He then traveled to Rome, where he was a pensionnaire at the Academie de France (Palazzo Mancini) from November 1754 to June 1755.

Back in Paris, he was admitted to the Academie de Saint-Luc on 13 September 1760, and rose within it to professeur-adjoint in 1762 and professeur in 1764. He is recorded as exhibiting in the Academie de Saint-Luc's salons in 1762 and 1764. He continued to work as a draughtsman and sculptor in Paris until his death in 1777.

There is very little modern critical literature on Delarue, and no exact, attributable quotations from named critics in major outlets could be confirmed. His standing instead rests on institutional and academic markers from his own lifetime, the 1750 Prix de Rome, the royal presentation at Versailles in 1754, and his later professorship at the Academie de Saint-Luc, together with the durable presence of his drawings and bas-relief designs in museum collections including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and the Maryland State Archives.

Delarue's market presence today is limited and mostly confined to drawings. The highest publicly confirmed sale identified is EUR 1,200 for "Suite de dix episodes de l'Histoire romaine," a group of ten drawings sold at Millon in Paris on 23 November 2023. Other recent results include EUR 300 for "Triomphe d'Amphitrite" at Millon on 10 October 2023 and EUR 704 for a pair of pen-and-ink drawings at Euvrard & Fabre, though the exact date of that sale could not be confirmed. No current gallery or estate representation could be identified for the artist, which is typical for an Old Master who died in 1777 and whose works circulate through auction houses and specialist dealers rather than through ongoing representation.

Delarue has no catalogue raisonne and no current gallery or estate representation, so attribution depends on academy records, museum cataloguing, and comparison with securely documented drawings and reliefs. Public auction data for his work is sparse; the highest confirmed public sale identified is EUR 1,200 for a suite of ten drawings sold at Millon in Paris in November 2023, with other recent results ranging from EUR 300 to EUR 704, so collectors should treat any single result as a data point rather than a trend. His name also appears in slightly different forms across sources, Louis Félix Delarue, Louis-Félix de La Rue, and it should not be confused with the unrelated twentieth-century painter Lucien Delarue.