Artus Quellinus III

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Artus Quellinus III (1653 – December 1686), known in England as Arnold Quellin, was a Flemish sculptor who trained in Antwerp and worked mainly in London. He often collaborated with the English sculptor Grinling Gibbons, and some works from their partnership can’t be clearly attributed to either man. After Quellinus’s early death, the large figurative sculptures produced in Gibbons’s workshop were said to have declined in quality, showing how important Quellinus was to those works.

He was born in Antwerp, the son of Artus Quellinus II, a sculptor who helped move Northern European sculpture from High Baroque to Late Baroque, and Anna Maria Gabron, sister of painter Willem Gabron. His brothers were Thomas Quellinus (a sculptor) and Cornelis Quellinus (a painter). He trained in his father’s workshop in Antwerp.

Quellinus married Frances Siberechts, the youngest daughter of Antwerp landscape painter Jan Siberechts. Siberechts had moved to London between 1672 and 1674 and joined the growing colony of Flemish artists there, likely encouraging Quellinus and his wife to move as well. Quellinus is first documented in England in 1679, when architect Hugh May noted he would work at Windsor Castle. From 1680 he worked in partnership with Grinling Gibbons, joining other Flemish artists Antoon Verhuke, John Nost, Peter van Dievoet, and Laurens van der Meulen. They collaborated on the altarpiece for the Roman Catholic chapel in Whitehall Palace (1685–86). After Quellinus’s early death, his widow married his studio assistant John Nost.