Workshop of Robert Campin
Southern Netherlands · Early Netherlandish painting
The story
This entry is not a person. It is the National Gallery's label for a picture made in Robert Campin's workshop in Tournai, by a painter trained there whose name has not survived.
The town's records say a little about who worked in that house. Jacques Daret, the son of a Tournai sculptor, was living with the Campin family by 1418 and was formally registered as Campin's apprentice in 1427. In 1432 he became a master of the painters' guild in his own right, and soon afterwards he painted an altarpiece for the abbot of Saint-Vaast, a great abbey at Arras. Those panels are the only surviving works documented as his.
In London the label goes on a portrait of a man in a grey Franciscan habit, painted before 1432 on an oak panel small enough to hold in one hand.
