Delcampe (16.. – 16..?)

« Écuyer ordinaire de la Grande Écurie du Roi au XVIIe siècle. — On ignore, dit Duplessis, la date de sa naissance et celle de sa mort, mais il semble probable qu’il est né dans les dernières années du XVIe siècle, et qu’il est mort à un âge avancé. Il appartenait à une famille espagnole dont un membre, Jean-Paul del Campo, fut le maître de Gaspar Collart et était Cavallerice (écuyer) au Haras de Grœnendael, construit en 1613 par Albert et Isabelle dans la forêt de Soigne[1]. On a même pensé que Jean-Paul del Campo et Delcampe n’étaient peut-être qu’un seul et même personnage, et il n’y a rien d’impossible à cela. L’existence du Haras de Grœnendael fut en effet courte et Delcampe aurait pu arriver en France vers 1640, car on ne le trouve pas sur l’état des dépenses des Écuries du Roi avant 1642. De plus, sur le plan de Gomboust, édité en 1652, mais qui représente Paris en 1649, son Académie est mentionnée avec son nom espagnol : Académie du Sr Del Campo[2]. Il était donc encore à ce moment connu du public sous ce nom. Lors de l’entrée de Louis XIV à Paris, le 26 août 1660, Delcampe figurait « le seul de ceux qui tiennent Académie, comme le plus ancien » à côté des seigneurs qui entouraient le cheval du Roi. (voyez Entrée de Louis XIV, brochure du Bureau d’Adresse.) » Mennessier de La Lance (1915-1921)

« Almost nothing is known of Delcampe, not even his first name. According to Mennessier, his dates of birth and death are unknown, but he probably was born in the late sixteenth century into a noble Spanish family; he died at some point after 1660. A certain Jean-Paul del Campo was an ‘écuyer au haras (stud farm) at Groenendael, near Brussels, built by Archduke Albert I. Mennessier thinks that this Jean-Paul del Campo and our Sieur Delcampo is the same person. That Delcampe was an ‘écuyer de la Grande écurie du roi’, as indicated on the title-page of his book, is confirmed by the appearance of his name on a 1642 payroll. We also know that he was the director of a Parisian académie: there are references to his school in contemporary sources, and on a 1649 map of Paris by Gomboust, it appears there as the ‘Academie du Sieur Del Campo’. During the entry of Louis XIV into Paris on 26 August 1660, Delcampe was among the nobles surrounding the king’s mount and he is described as the only one of that company who had an academy, thus indicating that he was still alive and his school continued to exist at that time. The title-page of L’Art demonter à cheval as well as the 1649 map of Paris refer to him as ‘sieur’; between that and his positions as a royal écuyer and the director of a noble académie, it can be assumed that he was noble. Even in 1664 Delcampe’s treatise L’Art de monter à cheval still was an early example of a French manual of horsemanship. Despite the fact that, by the date of its first appearance in 1658, it was competing against the popular and well known treatises of La Broue, Pluvinel, and Menou, it nonetheless was sufficiently popular in its own right to be revised and republished on three different occasions in less than thirty-five years: in 1664, 1671 and 1690. Because Delcampe was an écuyer du roi, his text reflects the views of a nobleman who was both a participant in and an observer of the court culture in which changing ideas about the meaning of nobility were born and whence they spread. This text also represents the ideas of a nobleman who ran a Parisian académie when such institutions were at the height of their popularity. His role as an écuyer-académiste made Delcampe, like Pluvinel, someone who actually helped to shape the shift in noble identity in the second half of the 17th century. » Dejager (2014)