Who is Robert Campin?

Robert Campin (c. 1375 – 26 April 1444), now usually identified gone the Master of Flémalle (earlier the Master of the Merode Triptych, before the discovery of three other thesame panels), was the first great master of Flemish and Early Netherlandish painting. Campin’s identity and the attribution of the paintings in both the “Campin” and “Master of Flémalle” groupings have been a business of controversy for decades. Campin was highly wealthy during his lifetime, and so his undertakings are relatively with ease documented, but he did not sign or date his works, and none can be confidently connected in the space of him.

A corpus of work is attached to the unidentified “Master of Flémalle,”so named in the 19th century after three religious panels said to have come from a monastery in Flémalle. They are each assumed to be wings of triptychs or polyptychs, and are the Virgin and Child gone a Firescreen now in London, a panel fragment with the Thief upon the Cross in Frankfurt, and the Brussels balance of the Mérode Altarpiece.

Campin was supple by 1406 as a master painter in Tournai, in today’s Belgium, and became that city’s leading painter for 30 years. He had attained citizenship by 1410, and may have studied below Jan van Eyck. His fame had spread acceptable by 1419 that he led a large and profitable workshop. He became keen in the revolt of the Brotherhoods in the before 1420s; this, along in imitation of an extra-marital affair in the vent of a woman named Leurence Pol, led to his imprisonment. Yet he maintained his standing and workshop until his death in 1444.

The into the future Campin panels shows the distress of the International Gothic artists the Limbourg brothers (1385 – 1416) and Melchior Broederlam (c. 1350 – c.1409), but display a more attainable observation than any earlier artists, which he achieved through innovations in the use of oil paints. He was flourishing in his lifetime, and the recipient of a number of civic commissions. Campin taught both Rogier van der Weyden (named in these to the front records as Rogelet de la Pasture, a French version of his name) and Jacques Daret. He was a contemporary of Jan van Eyck, and they met in 1427. Campin’s best known measure is the Mérode Altarpiece of c 1425–28.