Career
He provided high-style Baroque furniture for the court of William and Mary, specializing in carved, gessoed and gilded furniture of the highest quality. He was also employed in providing carved and gilded picture and looking-glass frames and in gilding the work of other carvers. Tessa Murdoch suggests, from Jean Pelletier"s shaky handwriting in 1702, that he was already working in a supervisory capacity at that date.
Pelletier"s name first appears in the English Lord Chamberlain"s accounts in 1690.
During William III"s reign he supplied the Crown with carved and gilded table frames, stands, screens and mirrors. Two sets of candlestands at Hampton Court Palace are attributed to him on the evidence of his accounts in 1699/1700 and 1701:
1699/1700 Foreign carving and guilding six pairs of large stands at £30 per pair— £180.
1701 Foreign carving and guilding two pairs of large stands— £70
A firescreen en suite is securely attributed to Pelletier. A pair of carved and gilded candlestands in the same style are in the collection at Temple Newsam, Leeds.
The pairs of tall torchères, intended to flank pier tables owe their inspiration to the solid silver furniture of Louis XIV"s Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.
Pelletier supplied over £600 worth of furnishings for the State Apartments at Hampton Court, 1699-1702. Three pairs of carved and gilded side tables at Windsor castle, long attributed to the royal cabinetmaker Benjamin Goodison and dated circa 1730 have been re-attributed to Pelletier, 1699, by Tessa Murdoch, who noted their similarity to contemporary cabinet stands at Versailles engraved by Pierre Lepautre. John Pelletier"s name also appears in the accounts of Ralph Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu, William III"s Master of the Wardrobe for supplying carved and gilded frames for Montagu House, Bloomsbury, London, from 1698 to his death in 1704.
Montagu had served as Charles II"s ambassador to the court of Louis XIV, and his own taste was distinctly French Baroque.
