(b Bruges, 1 April 1698; d Bruges, 17 Feb 1781). Flemish sculptor, architect and potter. He was probably first trained in his father’s carpenter’s workshop; in 1715 he was registered in Bruges as a master carpenter. He then worked with the Ghent sculptor Jan Boecksent (1660–1727), who had been assigned to decorate the Récolets church in Bruges and who was involved in the creation of the academy of Bruges. In 1722 Pulinx was appointed sculptor and decorator of municipal works, and in 1724 he became a member of a confraternity of painters that arose from the dissolution of the academy. During that period Pulinx worked mainly in wood, creating chiefly ecclesiastical furnishings, including some beautiful pulpits in the Watervleit church (1726) and in the Church of St Walburga at Furnes and the Heilig Bloedbaziliek at Bruges (both 1728). During the following decade he seems to have worked exclusively as an architect; among his works were his own house, In den Keerseboom (1735), and the English Convent, the House of Correction for men near the Hospice de la Madeleine and the Minnewater bridge, all in Bruges (1739). In 1741 Pulinx sculpted, for the Augustinian church in Bruges, the marble mausoleum of Jeanne-Marie Anchemant, Dame de la Mark; in 1747 he executed the mausoleum of Hendrik Jozef, Bishop van Susteren (Bruges, St Sauveur Cathedral), and in 1758 that of the Bishop of Castillon. However, large-scale sculpture commissions were scarce, and so in 1750 he founded with his son Hendrik Pulinx de jonge (d 1787) a pottery factory, which collapsed in 1764. The following year Pulinx was confined in the Alexian monastery in Bruges, remaining there until his death. He was one of the last great exponents of Baroque sculpture in the southern Netherlands.

• Pulinx, Hendrik, d'oude (1698-1781)
  • Belgium, §VII, 2(ii): Pottery, 1600–1800
  • Garemijn, Jan Antoon
  • Poucke, Karel van