Also Laurence Vandermuelen and Laurens de Malines. Sculptor originating in Malines, Low Countries. He came to London in 1675 and worked for Grinling Gibbons. He is one of several ‘servants to Mr. Grinling Gibbons, the carver’, named in a ‘License to Forainers employed at Windsor to remain here wth. out molestation’, dated 16 November 1678. George Vertue records that van der Meulen was employed alongside Pierre van Dieveot on Gibbons’ statue of King James II and that the two of them returned to the Low Countries in ‘the troubles of the Revolution’ (1688–89).
Sources: Roscoe, I., A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009; Vertue, G., Vol. IV, Walpole Society, no xxiv, 1935/36, p. 50; Ward-Jackson, P., Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022