Dieric Bouts the Elder

Dieric Bouts painted with the jewel-like precision of Early Netherlandish art, but with a quieter, more solemn mood than most of his contemporaries. His figures are tall, slender and still, with long faces and restrained gestures, set in carefully observed landscapes and rooms with a new sense of depth.

Born in Haarlem around 1415, he worked in Leuven from about 1457 and became its official city painter in 1468. His Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament, commissioned in 1464 and still in St Peter’s Church in Leuven, has at its centre the first Last Supper in Flemish panel painting, one of the earliest northern pictures to use Italian single-point perspective. His late Justice of Otto panels are in Brussels. He died in Leuven in 1475, and his two sons carried on the workshop.

Mary and Child is an example of the small devotional panels he painted for private prayer.