Joos van Cleve

For nearly four centuries no one knew his name. The paintings were grouped under a workshop label, the Master of the Death of the Virgin, after a large triptych in Cologne showing the Virgin's final hours. Then in 1894 a monogram on the back of that panel was read as Joos van der Beke, and a real Antwerp painter stepped out of anonymity: Joos van Cleve, who took his surname from Kleve, the town on the Lower Rhine.

He ran a busy shop in Antwerp from about 1511, in the city that had just become the trading capital of northern Europe, and he watched Italian ideas arrive with the merchants. In his Virgin and Child pictures you can see him borrowing Leonardo's soft, smoky modelling of a face, the technique called sfumato, grafted onto a Flemish love of bright colour and fine detail.

His portraits were good enough to be summoned abroad. Around 1530 he was called to the French court, where he painted King Francis I and his queen, Eleanor of Austria. The likeness of Francis survives, a wide, watchful face above heavy, embroidered sleeves.