Overmantel Decoration, c. 1675-1677. Grinling Gibbons was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, of English parents. After training there as an artist, he came to England in the 1660s, and soon began to work as a sculptor, particularly in wood. One of his first large-scale decorative projects was a series of interiors at Cassiobury Park, the residence of the Earl of Essex near London. On the basis of an early 19th-century watercolour, this overmantel has been identified as one of the decorations for the Green Drawing Room of that house.