Robert Campin (1375–1444)
Born 1375 CE, died 1444 CE.
Robert Campin (c. 1378 in Valenciennes, France – 26 April 1444 in Tournai, then Bishopric, currently Belgium), now usually identified with the Master of Flémalle (earlier the Master of the Merode Triptych before the discovery of three other similar panels), was a master painter who, along with Jan van Eyck, initiated the development of early Netherlandish painting, a key development in the early Northern Renaissance. While the existence of a highly successful painter called Robert Campin is relatively well documented for the period, no works can be certainly identified as by him through a signature or contemporary documentation. A group of paintings, none dated, have been long attributed to him, and a further group were once attributed to an unknown "Master of Flémalle". It is now usually thought that both groupings are by Campin, but this has been a matter of some controversy for decades. A corpus of work is attached to the unidentified "Master of Flémalle," so named in the 19th century after three religious panels said to have come from a monastery in Flémalle.
Text from the Wikipedia article Robert_Campin, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.