Rogier van der Weyden

Rogier van der Weyden was an early Netherlandish painter who lived from 1399 or 1400 to 1464, born in Tournai and active mainly in Brussels, initially known as Roger de la Pasture. His surviving works consist mainly of religious triptychs, altarpieces, and commissioned single and diptych portraits. He was highly successful in his lifetime, his paintings exported to Italy and Spain, and he received commissions from Philip the Good, Burgundian nobility, and foreign aristocrats; by the latter half of the fifteenth century he had eclipsed Jan van Eyck in popularity. His fame lasted only until the seventeenth century, and largely due to changing taste he was almost totally forgotten by the mid eighteenth century, before his reputation was slowly rebuilt over the two centuries that followed. Today he is known, alongside Robert Campin and Van Eyck, as one of the three great Early Netherlandish artists, the so-called Flemish Primitives, and widely as the most influential Northern painter of the fifteenth century. Very few details of his life are known beyond fragmentary civic records, though the paintings now attributed to him are widely accepted on stylistic evidence. He worked from life models, often idealizing certain facial features, and is known for an unusually broad range of colors and varied tones, so that even his whites are not repeated identically anywhere on the same canvas. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/