The Damerys who held the brush

Following on from the Chevalier: the name Damery does not only appear on gallery labels as a sitter. Three times, at least, it appears as the artist.

Walthère Damery, born in Liège in 1614, was a painter with a life story that reads like a novel. He travelled to England, then to Italy, was captured by pirates on the way and carried off to Algiers, escaped, painted an altarpiece for Toulon Cathedral in thanks, and came home to Liège a celebrated man. His ceiling of the four seasons and four elements still decorates the castle of Alden Biesen in Belgium. His younger brother Jacques trained under him and made his own name: contemporaries of Rubens, the pair of them. Greg tells me streets in their part of Belgium still carry the name.

Two centuries later came Eugène-Jean Damery, a French artist born in 1823, who died young, around thirty by repute, and left behind a self-portrait in pencil that has passed through the great dealers (Colnaghi of London most recently; Greg says one of his drawings sits in a French Rothschild collection).

And the tradition is not dead: Greg Damery himself, of the Canadian branch, is a working artist. He sent me his own self-portrait in red chalk, and you can judge the family resemblance across three and a half centuries for yourselves.

A name that keeps turning up holding a paintbrush, in Liège in 1640, in Paris in 1848, in Canada today, is a name worth being curious about.

Who is Greg, and where does his branch fit? That story is the next post in this series.