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Verhelst, Egid [Aegid], I
(b Antwerp, bapt 13 Dec 1696; d Augsburg, 19 April 1749). Flemish sculptor and stuccoist active in Germany. He was probably trained by his father Gillis Verhelst, and in 1718 went to Munich, presumably via Paris, where he entered the workshop of his fellow countryman, the leading court sculptor Guillielmus de Grof. After being resident in Ettal intermittently from 1726 to 1736, he settled in Augsburg in 1738. His earliest known work is a 60 mm-high head of a boy in ivory (1722; Munich, Bayer. Nmus.), a piece which prefigures his later cherubs. Of his works for Ettal Abbey 12 fairly crude over life-size marble figures (c. 1726–35) on the church façade and two charming wall fountains with lead figures (c. 1726–30) in the sacristy have been preserved. His chief work there, the high altar of the abbey church with a monumental Assumption, made either of wood or stucco with lead relief panels (from 1726), was destroyed by fire in 1744. Among Verhelst’s other works are four side altars and other sculptures for the abbey church of Diessen am Ammersee (1738–40), the pulpit of the abbey church at Ochsenhausen (1741), four allegorical figures in the throne-room of the prince-abbot’s residence at Kempten (c. 1742), a painted wood Lamentation group (c. 1745) in the pilgrimage church of Herrgottsruh at Friedberg, near Augsburg (see fig.), and figures or groups of the Seasons in cast lead in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich. He worked predominantly in wood, the preferred material of the local sculptors, but he also used stone and, in emulation of de Grof, lead. He collaborated with various Augsburg goldsmiths, carving models for their figurative works. He brought ideas from his Flemish homeland and from his teacher de Grof into the Rococo ecclesiastical sculpture of Bavaria and Swabia, and exerted a particular influence on the Augsburg stucco modellers, above all Johann Georg Üblher. Verhelst’s cherubs were also used for decades as models by other stuccoists of the Wessobrunn school. His sons Placidus Verhelst (1727–?78) and Ignaz Wilhelm Verhelst (1729–92) jointly continued the family workshop until 1774, when Placidus went to Moscow. They achieved a high standard of output, but are scarcely identifiable as separate creative individuals. A third son, Egid Verhelst II (1733–1818), was an engraver.
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