Raymond Delamarre

Raymond Henri Philippe Delamarre was born on 8 June 1890 in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, the son of a jeweler. He began an apprenticeship as an engraver before entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris around age sixteen or seventeen, where he studied sculpture in the studio of Jules-Felix Coutan. His training was interrupted first by compulsory military conscription from 1911 to 1913 and then by service through the First World War from 1914 to 1918.

He returned to his studies after the war and in 1919 won the Premier Grand Prix de Rome in sculpture, shared with Alfred Janniot, for the bas-relief La Gloire ramene le Heros au foyer familial. The prize carried a residency at the Academie de France a Rome, at the Villa Medicis, where he lived and worked from January 1920 to December 1924, with a stay at the French School at Athens during the same period.

Back in Paris, Delamarre built a career centered on public and decorative commissions through the interwar decades, working across sculpture, bas-relief, and medal design. He contributed to the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes, created a carved figure of Christ and eight Beatitudes for the 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale, completed bronze bas-relief panels for the first-class dining room of the ocean liner Normandie in 1935, and in 1937 finished a monumental bronze ensemble of three roughly four-meter figures for the Palais de Chaillot, tied to that year's Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne. With the architect Michel Roux-Spitz he also designed the Monument a la Defense du Canal de Suez in Ismailia, Egypt. Later in life, from 1961 to 1973, he led the Ateliers d'Art Sacre on the Place Furstenberg in Paris, succeeding Maurice Denis and Georges Desvallieres. He was married to Mariel Jean-Brunhes Delamarre and was decorated as a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur and with the Croix de guerre 1914 to 1918, among other prizes.

Delamarre continued working in his Paris studio until the end of his life. He died on 28 February 1986 in the 15th arrondissement of Paris at the age of 95, and is buried at the Cimetiere de l'Ouest in Boulogne-Billancourt.

Delamarre is consistently placed among the leading sculptors and medalists of the French Art Deco period, credited with major public commissions that remain in place today, including the Palais de Chaillot figures and the Normandie reliefs. Reference sources and dealer biographies emphasize the range of his output, from monumental public sculpture to ecclesiastical commissions and medal design, and note his long institutional role leading the Ateliers d'Art Sacre later in his career. No verbatim, attributable critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in the available research, so none is quoted here.

Delamarre's market is small and object-driven rather than headline-driven. The recorded auction high is USD 131,250 for the sculpture Mowgli, sold at Christie's New York in 2020 (the exact sale date is not published in available market summaries). A separately documented sale of the vase La Tentation reached USD 37,800 at Phillips in New York on 7 June 2022, and other tracked results at Sotheby's, including 19th and 20th century sculpture sales in London and Paris, have carried estimates in the range of a few thousand to roughly EUR 20,000 to 30,000, all below the Phillips result. His market activity spans bronzes, reliefs, medals, and decorative design objects, sold through European and American auction houses and through a small number of Paris dealers rather than a single primary gallery.

Delamarre's market is thin: auction appearances are infrequent, prices are modest relative to his institutional standing, and no catalogue raisonne exists to anchor attribution and provenance. A 2012 doctoral thesis on his public monuments and an estate-run archival site are the closest things to a systematic record of his output, but collectors should expect to rely on foundry signatures, gallery provenance, and case-by-case documentation. His work is best understood through its museum holdings and permanent public installations in France, which are more extensive and more securely documented than his auction history.