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(b Liverpool, Oct 26, 1759; d Rome, Aug 17, 1798).

English sculptor. He was born into a family of jewellers and as a child showed prodigious carving skills before serving his apprenticeship in the workshop of Thomas Carter (d 1795) from 1776. The following year he enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools, where his fine draughtsmanship is said to have prompted Joseph Nollekens (then Visitor) to abandon sketching altogether. In 1780 Deare became the youngest artist to win the Academy’s gold medal, with a model representing Adam and Eve from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ (probably terracotta; untraced). After a further three years with Carter he set up his own workshop in 1783, modelling figures for John Bacon (i), John Cheere and others, and exhibiting that year at the first exhibition of the Society for Promoting Painting and Design in Liverpool. Like John Gibson (i) later, he was encouraged by William Roscoe, the Society’s Vice-President. The four exhibited works represented ...

(b Ludlow, Salop, 1722–3; d 1801).

English goldsmith. In 1738 he was apprenticed to the Huguenot goldsmith Peter Archambo. He first entered a mark at Goldsmiths’ Hall, London, in 1745, when he gave his address as Piccadilly, London, and became a freeman of the Goldsmiths’ Company in 1746. Some of Heming’s work is distinctly French in character, and this may be due to the influence of Archambo, seen for example in a pair of Neo-classical candlesticks (1769; New York, Met.). Nevertheless, Heming used an eclectic range of sources, from the designs for silver in Eléments d’orfèvrerie (1748) by Pierre Germain (Heming’s trade card depicts a ewer designed by Germain) to A New Book of Ornaments (1752) by Matthias Lock and Henry Copland (c. 1706–53). The curving table-feet depicted in the latter appear on Heming’s épergnes.

Heming was an influential and highly regarded goldsmith. In 1760 he was appointed Principal Goldsmith to ...

[Jean-Jacques]

(b Geneva, May 23, 1790; d Bougival, June 4, 1852).

Swiss sculptor, painter and composer. Prompted by his early displays of artistic talent, Pradier’s parents placed him in the workshop of a jeweller, where he learnt engraving on metal. He attended drawing classes in Geneva, before leaving for Paris in 1807. By 1811 he was registered at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and subsequently entered its sculpture competitions as a pupil of François-Frédéric, Baron Lemot. A more significant contribution to his artistic formation around this time was the guidance of the painter François Gérard. Pradier won the Prix de Rome in 1813 and was resident at the French Academy in Rome, from 1814 until 1819. On his return to France, he showed at the Salon of 1819 a group Centaur and Bacchante (untraced) and a reclining Bacchante (marble; Rouen, Mus. B.-A.). The latter, borrowing an erotically significant torsion from the Antique Callipygean Venus, opens the series of sensuous Classical female subjects that were to become Pradier’s forte. In ...

(b Santiago, 1829; d Valparaíso, 1890).

Chilean architect. His father was unknown and his mother a humble laundress who made great efforts in order to educate her son. He began working for a cabinetmaker at the age of 13 and then joined a drawing class for craftsmen at the Instituto Nacional, Santiago. There were few professional architects in Chile at that time, and he was commissioned at the age of 18 to design the Casa de Orates building. Vivaceta Rupio joined the first architecture class of the Frenchman Claude François Brunet-Debaines (1788–1855), who had been contracted by the Chilean government. His fellow pupil Ricardo Brown and he were the first architects to be trained in Chile. As a result of his assiduity and determination, he was selected by Brunet-Debaines to complete outstanding works when the contract expired. Working in the 19th-century neoclassical tradition, with some gestures towards the neo-Gothic, Vivaceta Rupio rebuilt the towers of several Santiago churches and built several private houses and the church and convent of Carmen Alto. He contributed to repairs to the cathedral of Santiago and collaborated with ...