Dieric Bouts

15th century Dutch painter

Dieric Boutsrefn|group=note|According to Karel van Mander in his Het Schilderboeck of 1604, Bouts was born in Haarlem and was mainly active in Leuven (Louvain), where he was city painter from 1468. was an Early Netherlandish painter. Bouts may have studied under Rogier van der Weyden, and his work was influenced by van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. He worked in Leuven from 1457 (or possibly earlier) until his death in 1475. Bouts was among the first northern painters to demonstrate the use of a single vanishing point (as illustrated in his Last Supper).

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.

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 from the central panel in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. After this, he turned to the larger commission for the Justice Panels (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. 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.