John the Baptist

The panel has been cut down along its lower edge and once showed the Baptist at full length; it was probably the right wing of a small triptych, in which the saint turned toward a central image of the Virgin and Child. Robert Campin settled at Tournai about 1405–6 as a free master of the guild of painters and bought the town’s citizenship in 1410, which suggests he had been born elsewhere; the Museum counts him the first artist to observe the visible world with real power, and one of the earliest to explore oil-based colour in place of egg tempera, for all his debt to the manuscript illuminators of his day. The traditional attributes carry the saint’s meaning: the hair shirt and the white cloth of the newly baptized, and the banner with the red cross that stands for the resurrection. The painting was given to the Museum by the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust, and is held in the Cleveland Museum of Art.