A Donor Presented by a Saint

Dieric Bouts was the leading painter of Louvain in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, counted in his own day with Rogier van der Weyden among the masters of the Netherlands. Born at Haarlem and recorded at Louvain by 1457, he became the town’s official painter, and the great altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament that he completed for Saint Peter’s in 1467 remains the fixed point of his career. This small panel is a fragment: it once formed part of a larger devotional composition in which a kneeling donor was commended to his patron saint, the surviving portion preserving the old Netherlandish convention by which the living were shown praying in the same space as the holy. It belongs to the years about 1460 to 1465 and came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the bequest of Michael Friedsam.