Artus Quellinus III

Artus Quellinus III (1653, Antwerp – December 1686, London) was a Flemish sculptor active in London.^[1] His name is often anglicised to Arnold Quellan, Arnold Quellin or Arnold Quellinus or mistakenly given as Jan Quellinus.

He was the son of Artus Quellinus II and brother to the sculptor Thomas Quellinus and the painter Cornelis Quellinus^{[2][3][4][4][5][6][7]} He trained in his father's workshop in Antwerp before moving to London in 1682. He was married to Frances Siberechts, youngest daughter of the Antwerp-born painter Jan Siberechts, who had decided to emigrate to London to join the already-sizeable colony of Flemish artists there. It was probably Siberechts who convinced Quellinus III and his wife to also move there.

There is evidence that he was working in the studio of Hugh May in 1679, before moving to that of the Flemish carver and sculptor Grinling Gibbons in 1680, joining fellow Flemings Antoon Verhuke, John Nost, Peter Van Dievoet and Laurent Van Der Meulen^[8] Quellinus III and Gibbons collaborated on the altarpiece for the Roman Catholic chapel in Whitehall Palace (1685–86). After his early death, his widow married his studio assistant John Nost.

References

1. Biographical evidence on Quellin, article by Rolf Loeber.
2. Oxford Reference
3. Artus Quellinus III on RKD
4. Matthias Depoorter, 'Artus Quellinus II' on: Baroque in the Southern Netherlands
5. Arnold Quellin in: A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660–1851
6. Artus Quellinus III on geni.com
7. There is also a minority view that he was the son of Artus Quellinus I – see: Margaret Whinney, Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, 1964, p. 54 : "Arnold Quellin (1653–1686) was the eldest son of the distinguished sculptor whose workshop had decored the Royal Palace at Amsterdam, and the cousin of Artus Quellin II who had worked mainly in the familys native town of Antwerp".
8. "Gibbons, Grinling", in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 22, pp. 29–30 : "The attribution of these works is complicated by the presence of the highly trained Flemish sculptors whom Gibbons had gathered into his workshop by the end of the 1670s. These included Arnold Quellin (the nephew of Artus Quellinus I), John Nost, and Anthony Verhuke, joined in the next decade by, among others, Laurens Vander Meulen and Pierre Van Dievoet. Their experience and skill as makers of statues may have exceeded his own".

Bibliography

• (German) Artus Quellinus III.. In: Ulrich Thieme, Felix Becker in Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Band 27, E. A. Seemann, Leipzig 1933
• Rolf Loeber, "Arnold Quellin's and Grinling Gibbons's Monuments for Anglo-Irish Patrons", in: Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 72, n°. 285 (Spring, 1983), pp. 84–101.
• Margaret Whinney, Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, 1964, pp. 40, 52, 54–57, 59, 63, 93, 128.