JACQUES BERGÉ | SAINT NICHOLAS

Meeus Collection, Brussels

René de Broek, acquired circa 1950

Jacques Bergé entered the Guild of the Quatre Couronnés (the corporation of masons, stonecutters, sculptors and slate-quarrymen) in Brussels in 1714 and served his apprenticeship with the sculptor François Delpier. In 1715 he entered the studio of Nicolas Coustou in Paris. This stay in the French capital and a subsequent period in Rome, between 1717 and 1719, where he possibly worked with Pierre Legros, were to mark all of Bergé’s work. At the age of 26 he became a master in the Brussels guild and in 1737 he became the co-director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

Bergé worked mainly for two abbeys of the Premonstratensian order: Park near Leuven and the abbey at Ninove. In Brussels, his works can be seen in the Church of St Nicholas and on the square of the Grand Sablon, for which he realized a monumental fountain with Minerva holding a double portrait medallion of Franz I and Maria-Theresia.

The present Saint Nicholas can be compared to Saint Gregory the Great, also in terracotta, in the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and with the Saint Augustine in the church of the abbey of Park, particularly the texture of the undulating, heavy cloak.

The Meeus family were church masters of St Nicholas in Brussels. During the revolutionary wars in Belgium they bought a large part of the church decoration that was then being sold. They gave it back partially in 1815, including a series of reliefs by Bergé from the choir stalls (datable to 1735-170 ). René van de Broek bought the present sculpture in the 1950s from the Meeus family.