Dieric Bouts
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Although Dirk Bouts is reputed to have improved upon Jan in landscape, his panels’ of the altar at Louvain indicate no progress from elaboration to greater intimacy. On the contrary, Bouts even adds details and piles the most arbitrary objects upon each other. It is curious to note how with him the spirit of realism led to the fantastic landscape. The artist felt that biblical scenes should not occur in the Netherlands; and as he distinguished the figures as Orientals by turbans or other Eastern head-dresses and curious arms, so also he sought to give the landscape an exotic character. For Jan van Eyck, who had travelled widely, this was easy enough—he simply gave Portugal as the Orient; but Bouts, who had never left home, had to invent. As Holland was such a flat and level country, he thought the Orient must be mountainous; and he believed that by painting the opposite of what his home offered he could most correctly achieve the real character of biblical scenes. Another innovation by him is the endeavour to interpret certain effects of light. In contrast to Jan van Eyck, who painted everything in broad daylight, Bouts has in his St. Christopher depicted the background of the reddish light of the rising sun, while a ravine in the foreground is still enveloped in the darkness of night. In his Christ Taken Prisoner he has even attempted a problem not again ventured upon until it was at- tempted two centuries later by Elsheimer; while the background shows the pale light of the moon in a nightly sky, the figures are enveloped by the glare of torches."--The History of Painting: From the Fourth to the Early Nineteenth Century (1893/94) by Richard Muther |
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Dieric Bouts (1415 – 1475) was an Early Netherlandish painter known for such paintings as The Fall of the Damned (1470).
Bouts was among the first northern painters to demonstrate the use of a single vanishing point (as illustrated in his Last Supper).
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Works
Early works (before 1464)
Bouts' earliest work is the Triptych of the Virgin's Life in the Prado (Madrid), dated about 1445. The Deposition Altarpiece in Granada (Capilla Real) probably also dates to this period, around 1450–1460. A dismembered canvas altarpiece—now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels), the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), National Gallery (London), Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena), and a Swiss private collection—with the same dimensions as the Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament may belong to this period. The Louvre Lamentation (Pietà) is another early work.
Documented works
The Last Supper is the central panel of Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament, commissioned from Bouts by the Leuven Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in 1464. All of the central room's orthogonals (lines imagined to be behind and perpendicular to the picture plane that converge at a vanishing point) lead to a single vanishing point in the centre of the mantelpiece above Christ's head. However the small side room has its own vanishing point, and neither it nor the vanishing point of the main room falls on the horizon of the landscape seen through the windows. The Last Supper is the second dated work (after Petrus Christus' Virgin and Child Enthroned with St. Jerome and St. Francis in Frankfurt, dated 1457) to display an understanding of Italian linear perspective.
Scholars also have noted that Bouts' Last Supper was the first Flemish panel painting to depict the Last Supper. In this central panel, Bouts did not focus on the biblical narrative itself but instead presented Christ in the role of a priest performing the consecration of the Eucharistic host from the Catholic Mass. This contrasts strongly with other Last Supper depictions, which often focused on Judas's betrayal or on Christ's comforting of John. Bouts also added to the complexity of this image by including four servants (two in the window and two standing), all dressed in Flemish attire. Although once identified as the artist himself and his two sons, these servants are most likely portraits of the confraternity's members responsible for commissioning the altarpiece. The Last Supper was the central part of the altarpiece in the St. Peter's Church, Leuven.
The Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament has four additional panels, two on each side. Because these were taken to the museums in Berlin and Munich in the 19th century, the reconstruction of the original altarpiece has been difficult. Today it is thought that the panel with Abraham and Melchizedek is above the Passover Feast on the left wing, while the Gathering of the Manna is above Elijah and the Angel on the right wing. All of these are typological precursors to the Last Supper in the central panel.
After attaining the rank of city painter of Leuven in 1468, Bouts received a commission to paint two more works for the Town Hall. The first was an altarpiece of the Last Judgment (1468–1470), which exists today only in the two wings with the Road to Paradise and The Fall of the Damned in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille (France), and a fragmentary Bust of Christ (1470–1475), which occupied him until his death in 1475. He completed one panel and began a second, both depicting the life of the 11th-century Holy Roman Emperor Otto III. These pieces can now be seen in the Brussels Museum. The remaining two Justice panels were never completed.
Devotional panels and portraits
Many of Bouts' authentic works are small devotional panels, usually of the Virgin and Child. An early example is the Davis Madonna in New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art), excellent copies of which exist in the Bargello in Florence and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. This composition follows the formula of the miraculous icon of Notre-Dame-des-Grâces, which was installed in the cathedral of Cambrai (France) in 1454. The Virgin and Child in the National Gallery (London) is the largest and most ambitious of these Marian pictures.
In the realm of portraiture, Bouts expanded upon the tradition established by Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Petrus Christus. His 1462 Portrait of a Man in the National Gallery (London) is the first instance of a sitter shown in three-quarter view before a discernible background with a glimpse of the landscape out the window. Also widely attributed to Bouts is the Portrait of a Man in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), which resembles some of the figures in the artist's late Justice Panels of 1470–1475. Other portraits associated with Bouts, such as those in Washington (National Gallery of Art) and Antwerp (Royal Museum of Fine Arts), are more problematic.
Other works
The Last Supper and Justice Panels are the only works known to be definitely done by Bouts. The remaining panels from the Last Judgment Altarpiece (datable to 1468–1470) and the triptych The Martyrdom of St Erasmus (before 1466) are also fairly secure attributions. Aside from these, a number of other paintings have been attributed to him.
These are: Christ in the House of Simon, Christ in the House of Simon and Nativity fragment with the Virgin at Prayer in the Staatliche Museen. The triptych the Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus (Groeningemuseum), Virgin Enthroned with Four Angels (Capilla Real, Granada), and an Annunciation (Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon). The National Gallery holds The Entombment, the Virgin Enthroned with St. Peter and St. Paul,
Others are Saint James the Greater (Museu de Arte Sacra do Funchal, Madeira, Portugal), Ecce Agnus Dei, (Alte Pinakothek), Moses before the Burning Bush (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Bust of Christ (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), Virgin and Child (National Gallery of Art, Washington), and a Resurrection in the Norton Simon Museum of Art. Two are in the Louvre – a Nativity fragment with St. Joseph and the Virgin and Child Enthroned in a Niche.
Two Boutsian works in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich have perplexed art historians. One is the so-called Pearl of Brabant triptych, which writers as early as 1902 tried to separate from Bouts' authentic works. Recent research seems to refute this attempt. The other is a pair of panels from an altarpiece depicting the Passion, respectively showing the Betrayal of Christ and the Resurrection. For a long time these were considered some of Bouts' earliest works, but dendrochronological evidence now places them around the time of his death in 1475. Schone's 1938 invention of a "Master of the Munich Betrayal" is a more appropriate attribution.
Family
Bouts was married twice and had four children. One of his weddings was in Leuven about 1447. His two daughters went to convents, and his two sons became painters who carried the Bouts workshop into the mid-16th century. Little is known of the elder son, Dieric the Younger, although he appears to have continued in his father's style until his early death in 1491. The younger brother, Aelbrecht (or Albert), did likewise, but in a style that is unmistakably his own. His distinctive work propelled Boutsian imagery into the 16th century.
