Raymond Delamarre was born in 1890 and entered the École des Beaux Arts in Paris at sixteen, training in the studio of Jules Félix Coutan. His education was interrupted by military service from 1911 to 1913 and then again by the First World War. Sent to the front early in the conflict, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war before being exchanged in 1916. He returned to active duty with a sharpened awareness of sacrifice, loss, and national memory that would later inform his public commissions. After the armistice, he pursued the Prix de Rome, earning it in 1919 with a bas relief centered on the warrior’s return to the family home. The award brought him to the Villa Medici in Rome for several years, where he studied classical sculpture and developed a disciplined, monumental sense of figure and relief. By the mid 1920s, he emerged with a language that could move between academic clarity and modern stylization without losing emotional weight.

Delamarre became a key sculptural voice within Art Deco through a career that bridged medals, relief sculpture, and architectural programs. In 1925, he collaborated with architect Michel Roux Spitz on major projects tied to modern civic spectacle, including designs for fountains and large-scale decorative reliefs. His work appeared in the landmark Paris decorative arts exhibition and expanded into ambitious mythological and allegorical themes rendered with clean volumes and crisp contour. He contributed to the era’s great public settings, including major commissions connected to international expositions and state architecture. A defining achievement was his sculptural role in the decoration of the ocean liner Normandie, where his relief work helped translate national pride into modern form. He also produced powerful war memorials and civic monuments, often shaped by direct experience of wartime trauma and the need for communal remembrance. Although personally agnostic, he executed significant ecclesiastical work, approaching sacred subjects with the same structural dignity he brought to civic allegory. Late in life, he continued producing busts, plaques, and architectural reliefs, maintaining a steady presence in French public art through the 1960s and beyond.