Geertgen dead Sint Jans

John the Baptist (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie)

Nativity (National Gallery, London)

Geertgen tot Sint Jans , also Gerrit or Geertgen van Haarlem , Gerrit Gerritsz or Gérard de Saint-Jean (* around 1460/1465 (unknown), † before 1495 in Haarlem) was a Dutch painter.

Act

Little is known about his life. Karel van Mander describes him in his Schilderboeck as a lay brother of the Johanniterkloster Sint Jan in Haarlem (hence his nickname), where he was a pupil of Aelbert van Ouwater and died young, around 28 years old.

He is considered the main master of Dutch painting in the 15th century . His work puts the art of the northern Netherlands on the level of Flemish painting of the time. Certainly only two pictures in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna can be ascribed to him. However, his style is so characteristic that about 15 other pictures can be ascribed to him with relative certainty. The relative chronology of his pictures made it possible that he received his first training in the vicinity of the Bruges School of Painting.

successor

Geertgen himself is said to have trained painters like the master of Figdor's Descent from the Cross in Haarlem , or at least had a circle of successors. The master of the Braunschweig diptych is also considered his pupil.

literature

Leo Balet (1910)

• Rudolf EO Ekkart : Geertgen dead Sint Jans . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 50, Saur, Munich a. a. 2006, ISBN 3-598-22790-6 , pp. 546 f.
• Leo Balet : The early Dutchman Geertgen dead Sint Jans . The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1910
• Alfred Woltmann:  Haarlem, Gerrit van . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1879, p. 261.

Web links

Commons : Geertgen tot Sint Jans  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Geertgen tot Sint Jans in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by Geertgen tot Sint Jans at Zeno.org .
• Rijksmuseum