Julien Dillens (8 June 1849 - November 1904) was a Belgian sculptor born in Antwerp, the son of a painter. Dillens studied under Eugène Simonis at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts. In 1877 he received the Prix de Rome for A Gaulish Chief taken Prisoner by the Romans. At Brussels, in 1881, he executed the groups entitled Justice and Herkenbald, the Brussels Brutus. For the pediment of the orphanage at Uccle, Figure Kneeling (Brussels Gallery), and the statue of the lawyer Met depenningen in front of the Palais de Justice at Ghent, he was awarded the medal of honor in 1889 at the Paris Universal Exhibition, where, in 1900, his Two Statues of the Anspach Monument gained him a similar distinction. For the town of Brussels he executed The Four Continents (Maison du Renard, Grand, Place), The Lansquenets crowning the lucarnes of the Maison de Roi, and the Monument at Everard 't Serclaes under the arcades of the Maison de l'Etoile, and, for the Belgian government, Flemish Art, German Art, Classic Art and Art applied to Industry (all in the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels), The Laurel (Botanic Garden, Brussels), and the statue of Bernard van Orley (Place du petit Sablon / Kleine Zavel, Brussels). Additional works produced by Dillens include An Enigma (1876), the bronze busts of Rogier de la Pasture and P. P. Rubens (1879), Etruria (1880), The Painter Leon Frederic (1888), Madame Leon Herbo, Hermes, a scheme of decoration for the ogival faade of the hotel de ville at Ghent (1893), The Genius of the Funeral Monument of the Moselli Family, The Silence of Death (for the entrance of the cemetery of St Gilles), two caryatides for the town hall of St Gilles, presentation plaquette to Dr Heger, medals of MM. Godefroid and Vanderkindere and of The Three Burgomasters of Brussels, and the ivories Allegretto, Minerva and the Jamaer Memorial. Dillens died in Brussels in November, 1904.
References
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
