Robert Campin

Robert Campin , known as the “Master of Flémalle”, (towards 1378 - 1445) is a Flemish painter born with Valencian (Comté of Hainaut).

Biography

Resulting from a family of Valencian (County of Hainaut), it makes part of its training with Dijon. Its first appearance as a painter is at Tournai where several real acquisitions are with its name, which indicates a certain material success. Between 1418 and 1432, he becomes foreman to Tournai and has as raises Rogier van der Weyden starting from 1427 and Jacques Daret. It probably meets there Jan van Eyck during its visits in this city. It thereafter will engage intellectually on the side of the French against theBurgundian ones, which causes several judgments in justice to him.

Its works

The analysis of its work is made excessively difficult by the complete absence of table signed of its name and by the concept of work of workshop: the artist begins a painting which is completed by its pupils and does not hesitate to make copies of its hand of them or by other people. Moreover, Robert Campin is the painter who appears to be promptest to have been Maître of Flémalle, however the true identity remains at the very least rather obscure. Indeed much of other artists of the time could have incarnated this mysterious character. Attribution is thus prone to guarantee and rests on chronological arguments (only one table is dated), geographical and stylistics.

Campin remains however the large precursor of the painting of the Flemish rebirth where realistic representations and either symbolic systems of characters appear, decorations or objects. The irruption of the real life in works with crowned set of themes is completely new for the time: midwives in the nativity of the museum of Dijon, interior middle-class man in the virgin with the chimney (Museum of the Hermitage) or in the triptych of the Annunciation preserved at New York.

This “realism” gradually involves the disappearance of certain religious symbols: gilded funds or haloes and one passes successively from a nativity on a “scene which no spectator could never have seen” with a Annunciation “in a theoretically visible space and nevertheless rather abstract”, finally, with a Sainte Beard “of which each one among us could think of spectator” (Tzvetan Todorov).

It made a certain number of Portrait S (of which two are visible with the National Gallery with London), fixed of three-quarter, the faces filling the essence of the framework, and who are the first to take in model notable buildings, witnesses of “the irruption triumphing over the individual” (Tzvetan Todorov).

Random links: