Jan Frans Boeckstuyns

[2] While he mainly created church furniture and decorations, he also produced a number of small-scale works, including crucifixes and terracotta figures.

He has to be distinguished from the sculptor Gillis Frans Boeckstuyns who was baptised in the St. Rumbold's Cathedral in Mechelen on 3 July 1651 and likely was a relative.

Faydherbe was a sculptor from Mechelen who had studied in the workshop of Rubens in Antwerp where he became part of the artists developing the Flemish Baroque style in painting and sculpture.

He would invite, after the Sunday high mass, a number of indigent children to his workshop and give them free classes in modelling and sculpture.

[5] Boeckstuyns is best known for the many types of church furniture he created, including pulpits, confessionals, communion benches, altars, tabernacles, etc.

The pulpit was conceived for the rather small Church of Our Lady of Leliendaal, in Mechelen, which was designed by Boeckstuyns' master Lucas Faydherbe .

[9] The lower part of the composition simulates a rock, in the hollow of which is the main subject: Saint Norbert, who after being struck by lightning, has been knocked off his horse.

[3] In the Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk in Mechelen, Boeckstuyns created three wooden confessionals with allegorical figures (1690) which testify to his rich imagination.

He devised a wide variety of facial expressions in the figures included in the confessionals, from the sinner begrudgingly folding his hands as a sign of repentance to the pensive angel holding Veronica's cloth.

[4] Boeckstuyns also drew the plan for a facade wall, decorated with a figure of Saint Sebastian, for the headquarters of the Archers' Guild of Mechelen.