(b Maastricht, 20 May 1784; d Rome, 3 March 1836). Flemish sculptor. He gave up his apprenticeship as a goldsmith in Venlo to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He then went to Hamburg and subsequently stayed in St Petersburg between 1806 and 1814, where he probably trained with the Antwerp sculptor Joseph Camberlain (1756–1821). In 1814 he returned to the Low Countries and spent several months at Anne-Louis Girodet’s studio in Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon of 1819. In the same year he went to Rome, where his terracotta St Sebastian Martyr (sketch in Brussels, Mus. A. Mod.) won the first prize in a competition organized by Antonio Canova. During this period he began working in the studio of Bertel Thorvaldsen, whose pupil and assistant he became. From the beginning of the 1820s in his numerous variations on the theme of the Diskobolos (plaster; examples in Brussels, Mus. A. Mod.), Kessels demonstrated his devotion to Classical and Hellenistic sculpture as interpreted by Thorvaldsen according to the doctrines of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Among his numerous classically minded patrons was William Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, who commissioned two marble bas-reliefs, Day and Night (1819), and Diskobolos Preparing to Throw (1828; all Chatsworth, Derbys). In the late 1820s Kessels renounced the pure classicism of Thorvaldsen in favour of the more seductive style of Canova and the pathos of the Italian Baroque, as in his monument to the Comtesse de Celles (marble, 1828; Rome, S Giuliano dei Belgi). The romantic emphasis of his Flood Scene (plaster, c. 1833; Brussels, Mus. A. Mod.) differentiates it from the works of his last period, which are imbued with religious sentimentality. In Rome Kessels taught the Liège sculptors Louis Jéhotte (c. 1803–84) and Eugène Simonis, who exerted an influence through their teaching at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. On Kessels’s death his studio, having been inventoried by Thorvaldsen, was acquired by the Belgian government and transferred to the Musée d’Art Moderne, Brussels.

• Kessels, Mathieu
  • Simonis, Eugène