Jacques Roettiers

Who was Jacques Roettiers?

Jacques Roettiers was a noted engraver in England and France, and one of the most celebrated Parisian goldsmiths and silversmiths of his day.

Roettiers was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, to Norbert Roettiers and his wife Winifred Clarke, niece of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. As a Roettiers, he was born into a distinguished family of medallists, engravers, and goldsmiths. Roettiers studied drawing and sculpture at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, winning a prize to be pensionnaire du Roi at the French Academy in Rome. Instead he remained in Paris to learn medal-engraving and in 1732 moved to London. There he was appointed Engraver at the Royal Mint.

He returned to Paris in 1733, however, where he became a master and designed a whole service for Louis, Dauphin of France, the son of Louis XV of France. In that same year, he married the sixteen-year-old daughter of Nicolas Besnier, orfèvre du Roi. In 1736 he created perhaps his finest piece for Louis Henri, Duc de Bourbon: a Rococo silver surtout de table representing a hunting scene. When Besnier died in 1737, Roettiers took his position.