Gaspar de Crayer

To walk into a church in the old Southern Netherlands in the 17th century was often to stand before a de Crayer. Born in Antwerp in 1584, he made his career in Brussels, becoming the leading painter of the city and turning out a huge number of altarpieces for churches, convents and abbeys across the Catholic Low Countries, with orders arriving from Germany and Spain as well.

This was the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church answered the plainness of Protestant worship with large, warm, crowded images meant to move ordinary believers, and de Crayer supplied them by the wall-full. He worked in the shadow of Rubens, the towering figure of Flemish Baroque, borrowing motifs so exactly that scholars suspect he had some contact with Rubens's busy Antwerp workshop.

The court noticed. He became painter to the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, the Spanish king's brother who governed the region, and designed the decorations for Ferdinand's ceremonial entry into Ghent. He settled in that city in old age and kept painting into his eighties, dying there in 1669.