Follower of Robert Campin

The National Gallery gives this name to a painter who worked in the manner of Robert Campin, the leading master of Tournai in the 1420s and 1430s. In the Gallery's usage a follower is someone who admired an artist's style and was not necessarily his pupil. The painter's own name is lost.

In London the name goes on a panel, the Virgin and Child before a Firescreen, assembled around 1440 from elements of compositions by Campin and by the Brussels painter Rogier van der Weyden. The Gallery's catalogue adds that the same artist perhaps also painted the Mérode Altarpiece, a small Annunciation triptych in New York that is often counted among Campin's key works. Lorne Campbell, the Gallery's specialist in early Netherlandish painting, had already put the two pictures under one hand, which he called the Master of Mérode. The Metropolitan Museum, which owns the triptych, catalogues it as the work of Campin's workshop.