Sculptor. He was the son of the Antwerp sculptor, Artus Quellin. He came with his brother Thomas to England, and while his brother went on to Copenhagen, he stayed, going into partnership with Grinling Gibbons in 1681. The partnership was dissolved in 1683, but had been resumed by 1686, when Gibbons and Quellin were commissioned to execute the ‘great altarpiece’ for Whitehall Palace. Quellin, on his own account, made five statues of sovereigns for the Royal Exchange, statues of Charles II and Sir John Cutler (1683, now in the Guildhall) for the Royal College of Physicians, and another of Sir John Cutler for the Grocers’ Company. He was also responsible for some garden ornaments at Carlton, County Kildare, Ireland. The only church monument securely attributed to him is that to Thomas Thynne (1684) in Westminster Abbey, although much that is fine in Gibbons’s output may be by him. Quellin’s foreman, John Nost, later married his master’s widow, and went on to run a flourishing sculpture business of his own.
Bibliography: G. Beard, The Work of Grinling Gibbons, London, 1989; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 1015–18; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 410–12.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011
