Cornelis Engebrechtsz.

Leiden's first painter of real importance was Cornelis Engebrechtsz, active in the Dutch town around 1500, when the Netherlands was still Catholic and altarpieces were the great commissions. He ran a large, busy workshop and worked in an elaborate late-Gothic manner, with crowded, emotional scenes of Christ's Passion.

His lasting mark is who came out of that workshop. Lucas van Leyden, who became a leading printmaker of the Northern Renaissance, trained with him, as did Aertgen van Leyden and Engebrechtsz's own sons. Within a couple of decades the pupil's fame had eclipsed the master's.

Sources place his birth in the early 1460s, and he died in Leiden in 1527. Several of his signed altar wings survive in the museum of his home city.