Fruit on a Salver on a Marble Ledge
George Gregor Delotz (1814/1815–1879)
National Trust for Scotland, Brodie Castle
A painter of London scenes and fruit and flower compositions who exhibited at the Royal Academy, British Institution and Society of British Artists from 1848 to 1864. The RA exhibits, three in 1848 and one in 1850, were London views as was one at the BI in 1850: the other five there in 1861–1864 (all years) were of fruit, with a second one of flowers in 1863, all priced between £3 and £10. He only exhibited at the SBA in 1862, again with a Flower piece at ten guineas and a subject titled Where there is life there is hope! at eight. Delotz was born in Jedburgh, Roxburghshire, and apparently in 1814/1815: where 1818 or 1819 appear, they are perhaps based on initial press reports of his age at death. In 1924 Campbell Dodgson of the British Museum was in contact with two surviving daughters – Mrs Frederick James Hedges and Mrs Joseph Watmore – who reported that their father ‘was a reticent man, self-absorbed, who told them little about his life and work’.
The connection was made when Dodgson purchased 92 etchings and about a dozen drawings by Delotz for the Museum from the Watmores: another 18 went to the V&A about the same time (see Print Collector’s Quarterly, vol. XV, no. 1 (1928) p.71 ff.). Some of those in the British Museum, which acquired a few more in 1929, are flower pieces but most a range of landscape, marine and city views.
Delotz’s French father was Grégoire Delotz (1779–1866), son of a well-established merchant family in Thiers (Auvergne). In May 1799 he enlisted as a hussar in the French army and rapidly advanced through ‘zeal, bravery and distinguished conduct’ on campaign in central Europe in 1800. Promotions to corporal in June and sergeant in July were followed by battlefield elevation to officer rank as sous-lieutenant under Generals Lecourbe and Moreau in September. At Austerlitz, on 2nd December 1805, his horse was shot from under him and, as a lieutenant in the 11th Dragoon regiment, he took two gunshot wounds in General Dupont’s defeat by the Spaniards at the Battle of Bailén, Andalusia, on 16th–19th July 1808. On the 22nd he became one of 17,000 prisoners taken there and, with other officers, was transferred to British custody and sent to England, where he was first held at Portsmouth from October but then sent to live on parole at Crediton in October 1810. In March 1811, renewed fears of French invasion saw about 240 French parolees in the area recalled to Plymouth and shipped north to Leith via Deal in the frigate 'Romulus' for re-billeting in the Scottish borders. He was placed at Jedburgh.
Prisoner-of-war records describe him as a handsome man and although Mrs Watmore said that he married a Scottish woman while there, no such marriage is recorded. His son, George Gregor, was probably illegitimate and born after his father was repatriated to France in June 1814, following Napoleon’s initial surrender. George Gregor’s own marriage record is also the only source that calls his father ‘George Gregor’ (probably a misunderstanding from being told they had the same name) and a ‘Farmer’, which may have been a parole occupation.
On repatriation, Delotz senior continued his army career: he became a captain in the French 4th Dragoons in August 1817 and retired as a lieutenant-colonel in the 10th Dragoons in 1831. Having been made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in November 1814, he advanced to Officier in 1822 and was a Chevalier of the Order of St Louis, 1820–1830 (when it was abolished). In February 1821, at Thiers, he married 22-year-old Suzanne Magdaleine A. Marilhat, from a local landowning family and elder sister of the Orientalist painter Prosper Marilhat (1811–1847), and had other children with her. He died at Thiers aged 87 on 19th December 1866. Whether, after 1814, he had any contact with or sent any support to his half-British infant son or the latter’s mother is unknown.
According to his daughters, George Gregor was a decorative house painter by profession, noted for graining work. They said that he came to London in early life, married there in about 1838 to Elizabeth Cassanet Evans (bap. 18 February 1821–1880) and had eleven children. Of these Mrs Hedges was eldest and claimed to be 85 in 1924, though then about 83. Her parents in fact married at St Luke’s, Old Street, on 26th October 1840, when Delotz’s address was 28 Tabernacle Row, City Road: she was born in 1841, married in 1877 and probably died in 1930. The other nine identified siblings, of whom five lived to no more than nine, were: Mary Nancarrow (1843–1852); George Gregor (I) (b./d.1845); George Gregor (II) (1846–1852); Florence Cassinette [sic] (b.1848, m.1880 to Joseph Watmore and both d.1931); Claude Gregor (1852–1856); Horace (1854–1938); Sydney Gregor (1859–1881); Edith Gregor (b.1859, m.1900 to Martin Perls, d.1919 in Berlin) and George William (1861–1866).
The 1841 census lists Delotz, ‘Artist’, and his wife at 4 Theobald’s Road. By 1848 the growing family had moved to 2 Clarence Place, St Pancras, and in 1849 to 11 Duke Street, Adelphi. The 1851 Post Office Directory calls him a ‘picture dealer’ there but before the 1851 census on 30th March they had again moved to 28 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, where he is listed as a ‘grainer’. From about 1853/1854 baptismal records suggest they had already shifted north to 17 Huntley Street, Bloomsbury, which was his BI exhibiting address in 1860–1863 (though the SBA list says ‘Bedford Square’ in 1862). In 1864 it was 34 Villiers Street, Strand, and by late that year or in 1865 he was at his last home, 30 Southampton Street, Pentonville, where the 1871 census again calls him ‘Artist’.
As a fine-art painter Delotz appears to have been self-taught, working in both oil and watercolour. His daughters said he did it primarily for recreation and ‘went on students’ days to the National Gallery, where he copied Titian, Rembrandt and Turner.’ He also studied at the British Institution, where old masters lent by its aristocratic members for summer exhibitions were left for student or ‘probationer’ copying after they closed and the results were shown in the autumn. A press report of 1847 (Morning Herald, 15th November) mentions a landscape by Delotz copied from Rubens, while others of 1849 note copies by him after Titian, Cuyp and Christian Dietrich. In 1856 he was noticed for a fruit composition copied after Jan de Heem (a celebrated still-life master) and a Venetian view after Guardi. A privately owned fruit piece by Delotz still bears a label on the back showing that it was prize no. 156 in the June 1861 subscribers’ draw of the Art Union of Great Britain. Since that body bought 14 pictures for the purpose from the BI spring exhibition of 1861 it is beyond reasonable doubt Delotz’s A Study of Fruit (no. 490), priced at £5.
His printmaking was also apparently self-taught and a personal hobby. His daughters ‘knew practically nothing about his etchings but said that he spent much money on making them, and never sold, published or exhibited his prints.’ Dodgson noted that none were larger than 6 x 8 inches; that they are ‘almost entirely soft-ground etchings, aquatints, or a combination of the two processes’ and that Delotz never used dry-point or etched on a hard surface. He considered them ‘most exceptional’ both for their ‘wholly unprofessional character’, small scale, and for their period given that English aquatint was by then ‘practically extinct’.
The small scale at which Delotz seems to have worked in all media, and at least semi-privately, supports his daughters’ suggestion of his self-absorbed character, but if they told Dodgson the tragic end-result he kept it to himself. In Greenwich Park on the afternoon of Thursday 13th November 1879, a local boy called Philips saw a respectably dressed man of about 60 sitting with his back to a tree: as he looked, the man raised a pistol and shot himself through the head. Paper in his pockets soon led to his identification as ‘George Gregor De Lotze, a grainer of 30, Southampton Street, Pentonville’. No explanation was offered at the Greenwich coroner’s inquest and the jury’s verdict was suicide owing to ‘temporary insanity’. His age at death was officially registered as 64.
Delotz’s son Horace was his only painter successor. Census returns and other sources show him as a ‘grainer’ in 1871, ‘artistic decorator’ in 1881, ‘artist’ in 1891, ‘fresco painter/artist’ in 1898, 1901 and 1911. He married in 1881 but was widowed in 1884 and remarried in 1891 to Jessie Bain, an American. They emigrated to New York in 1892 where she died in childbirth in October and their daughter four months later. Horace then returned to England and by a third wife, Mary Tointon (m.1898), had five children: they included two boys through whom the name De Lotz – the form he used – continued. His sister Florence Watmore had three surviving children. Their brother Sydney Gregor, a ‘stamper at Somerset House’ in 1871 and a solicitor’s clerk at the time of his death in 1881, had a common-law wife called Elizabeth Lewis and one son by her (Louis Eugene, b.1878) but he in turn died childless. Edith Gregor, the youngest Delotz daughter and her German husband, Martin Perls (a Berlin-based wholesale merchant in essential oils, with a London office) had at least one son, born in Germany in 1902.
Summarised from Art UK’s Art Detective discussion ‘Do you recognise the artist’s monogram?’
Delotz’s French father was Grégoire Delotz (1779–1866), son of a well-established merchant family in Thiers (Auvergne). In May 1799 he enlisted as a hussar in the French army and rapidly advanced through ‘zeal, bravery and distinguished conduct’ on campaign in central Europe in 1800. Promotions to corporal in June and sergeant in July were followed by battlefield elevation to officer rank as sous-lieutenant under Generals Lecourbe and Moreau in September. At Austerlitz, on 2nd December 1805, his horse was shot from under him and, as a lieutenant in the 11th Dragoon regiment, he took two gunshot wounds in General Dupont’s defeat by the Spaniards at the Battle of Bailén, Andalusia, on 16th–19th July 1808. On the 22nd he became one of 17,000 prisoners taken there and, with other officers, was transferred to British custody and sent to England, where he was first held at Portsmouth from October but then sent to live on parole at Crediton in October 1810. In March 1811, renewed fears of French invasion saw about 240 French parolees in the area recalled to Plymouth and shipped north to Leith via Deal in the frigate 'Romulus' for re-billeting in the Scottish borders. He was placed at Jedburgh.
Prisoner-of-war records describe him as a handsome man and although Mrs Watmore said that he married a Scottish woman while there, no such marriage is recorded. His son, George Gregor, was probably illegitimate and born after his father was repatriated to France in June 1814, following Napoleon’s initial surrender. George Gregor’s own marriage record is also the only source that calls his father ‘George Gregor’ (probably a misunderstanding from being told they had the same name) and a ‘Farmer’, which may have been a parole occupation.
On repatriation, Delotz senior continued his army career: he became a captain in the French 4th Dragoons in August 1817 and retired as a lieutenant-colonel in the 10th Dragoons in 1831. Having been made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in November 1814, he advanced to Officier in 1822 and was a Chevalier of the Order of St Louis, 1820–1830 (when it was abolished). In February 1821, at Thiers, he married 22-year-old Suzanne Magdaleine A. Marilhat, from a local landowning family and elder sister of the Orientalist painter Prosper Marilhat (1811–1847), and had other children with her. He died at Thiers aged 87 on 19th December 1866. Whether, after 1814, he had any contact with or sent any support to his half-British infant son or the latter’s mother is unknown.
According to his daughters, George Gregor was a decorative house painter by profession, noted for graining work. They said that he came to London in early life, married there in about 1838 to Elizabeth Cassanet Evans (bap. 18 February 1821–1880) and had eleven children. Of these Mrs Hedges was eldest and claimed to be 85 in 1924, though then about 83. Her parents in fact married at St Luke’s, Old Street, on 26th October 1840, when Delotz’s address was 28 Tabernacle Row, City Road: she was born in 1841, married in 1877 and probably died in 1930. The other nine identified siblings, of whom five lived to no more than nine, were: Mary Nancarrow (1843–1852); George Gregor (I) (b./d.1845); George Gregor (II) (1846–1852); Florence Cassinette [sic] (b.1848, m.1880 to Joseph Watmore and both d.1931); Claude Gregor (1852–1856); Horace (1854–1938); Sydney Gregor (1859–1881); Edith Gregor (b.1859, m.1900 to Martin Perls, d.1919 in Berlin) and George William (1861–1866).
The 1841 census lists Delotz, ‘Artist’, and his wife at 4 Theobald’s Road. By 1848 the growing family had moved to 2 Clarence Place, St Pancras, and in 1849 to 11 Duke Street, Adelphi. The 1851 Post Office Directory calls him a ‘picture dealer’ there but before the 1851 census on 30th March they had again moved to 28 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, where he is listed as a ‘grainer’. From about 1853/1854 baptismal records suggest they had already shifted north to 17 Huntley Street, Bloomsbury, which was his BI exhibiting address in 1860–1863 (though the SBA list says ‘Bedford Square’ in 1862). In 1864 it was 34 Villiers Street, Strand, and by late that year or in 1865 he was at his last home, 30 Southampton Street, Pentonville, where the 1871 census again calls him ‘Artist’.
As a fine-art painter Delotz appears to have been self-taught, working in both oil and watercolour. His daughters said he did it primarily for recreation and ‘went on students’ days to the National Gallery, where he copied Titian, Rembrandt and Turner.’ He also studied at the British Institution, where old masters lent by its aristocratic members for summer exhibitions were left for student or ‘probationer’ copying after they closed and the results were shown in the autumn. A press report of 1847 (Morning Herald, 15th November) mentions a landscape by Delotz copied from Rubens, while others of 1849 note copies by him after Titian, Cuyp and Christian Dietrich. In 1856 he was noticed for a fruit composition copied after Jan de Heem (a celebrated still-life master) and a Venetian view after Guardi. A privately owned fruit piece by Delotz still bears a label on the back showing that it was prize no. 156 in the June 1861 subscribers’ draw of the Art Union of Great Britain. Since that body bought 14 pictures for the purpose from the BI spring exhibition of 1861 it is beyond reasonable doubt Delotz’s A Study of Fruit (no. 490), priced at £5.
His printmaking was also apparently self-taught and a personal hobby. His daughters ‘knew practically nothing about his etchings but said that he spent much money on making them, and never sold, published or exhibited his prints.’ Dodgson noted that none were larger than 6 x 8 inches; that they are ‘almost entirely soft-ground etchings, aquatints, or a combination of the two processes’ and that Delotz never used dry-point or etched on a hard surface. He considered them ‘most exceptional’ both for their ‘wholly unprofessional character’, small scale, and for their period given that English aquatint was by then ‘practically extinct’.
The small scale at which Delotz seems to have worked in all media, and at least semi-privately, supports his daughters’ suggestion of his self-absorbed character, but if they told Dodgson the tragic end-result he kept it to himself. In Greenwich Park on the afternoon of Thursday 13th November 1879, a local boy called Philips saw a respectably dressed man of about 60 sitting with his back to a tree: as he looked, the man raised a pistol and shot himself through the head. Paper in his pockets soon led to his identification as ‘George Gregor De Lotze, a grainer of 30, Southampton Street, Pentonville’. No explanation was offered at the Greenwich coroner’s inquest and the jury’s verdict was suicide owing to ‘temporary insanity’. His age at death was officially registered as 64.
Delotz’s son Horace was his only painter successor. Census returns and other sources show him as a ‘grainer’ in 1871, ‘artistic decorator’ in 1881, ‘artist’ in 1891, ‘fresco painter/artist’ in 1898, 1901 and 1911. He married in 1881 but was widowed in 1884 and remarried in 1891 to Jessie Bain, an American. They emigrated to New York in 1892 where she died in childbirth in October and their daughter four months later. Horace then returned to England and by a third wife, Mary Tointon (m.1898), had five children: they included two boys through whom the name De Lotz – the form he used – continued. His sister Florence Watmore had three surviving children. Their brother Sydney Gregor, a ‘stamper at Somerset House’ in 1871 and a solicitor’s clerk at the time of his death in 1881, had a common-law wife called Elizabeth Lewis and one son by her (Louis Eugene, b.1878) but he in turn died childless. Edith Gregor, the youngest Delotz daughter and her German husband, Martin Perls (a Berlin-based wholesale merchant in essential oils, with a London office) had at least one son, born in Germany in 1902.
Summarised from Art UK’s Art Detective discussion ‘Do you recognise the artist’s monogram?’
Text source: Art Detective
