Dieric Bouts
Dieric Bouts[note 1] (born c. 1415 – 6 May 1475)[2] 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.[3]
Dieric Bouts
Bouts was among the first northern painters to demonstrate the use of a single vanishing point (as illustrated in his Last Supper).
Works[edit]
Early works (before 1464)[edit]
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.[4] A dismembered canvas altarpiece—now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels),[5] the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles),[6] National Gallery (London),[7] Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena),[8] 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)[9] is another early work.
Documented works[edit]
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.
Family[edit]
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.
Exhibition Dieric Bouts, Creator of Images[edit]
In 2023, the museum of Leuven (Belgium), organised a retrospective exhibition[1] on the work of Bouts, entitled Dieric Bouts, Creator of Images, under the direction of Peter Carpreau. The main themes in the exhibition were Bouts's devotional work, his landscape painting, the use of perspective and the beauty of the banal in his paintings. Specific to this exhibition was the link made between Bouts' work and today's visual culture.