Jan van Logteren

The largest commission of Jan van Logteren's short life stands in Haarlem. Between 1735 and 1738 the organ builder Christian Müller made a new great organ for the Grote Kerk, the city's main church, and Van Logteren, a sculptor from Amsterdam, decorated its front and carved its statues, more than 25 of them, larger than life.

He was baptised in Amsterdam in 1709, the son of the sculptor Ignatius van Logteren, and trained and worked in his father's workshop. After Ignatius died in 1732, Jan took the business over. Its customers were the rich merchants of the canal ring, who wanted garden statues, carved facades and stucco for their halls and staircases, and Jan is thought to have done much to bring the lighter, curling forms of the rococo into those Amsterdam houses. He was a friend of the painter Jacob de Wit, who painted ceilings for the same kind of houses.

He stopped working in 1741 and was buried in Amsterdam in October 1745, aged 36.