Jan Provoost
1529 · Southern Netherlands · Northern Renaissance
The story
In the spring of 1521 Albrecht Dürer, the great German printmaker, was travelling through the Low Countries, and in Bruges he stayed three days with a local painter, drawing his host's portrait twice, once in charcoal and once in silverpoint. The host was Jan Provoost, then the most established painter in the city.
Provoost ran a busy Bruges workshop and served repeatedly as an officer, and twice as dean, of the painters' guild. He worked in the tradition of the early Flemish masters, with their sharp detail and enamel-bright colour. One surviving panel shows Death as a skeleton leaning in at a window to hand a bill to a terrified moneylender, a blunt reminder that wealth buys no reprieve.
His largest commission came near the end: a 'Last Judgement' painted in the mid-1520s for the Bruges town council, to hang in the room where the aldermen sat in judgement themselves. He died in the city in 1529.
