QUENTIN MASSYS (1547)

Flemish artist, the first important painter of the Antwerp school.

Trained as a blacksmith in his native Louvain he is said to have studied painting after falling in love with an artist´s daughter.

In 1491 he went to Antwerp and was admitted into the painters guild.

Among Massys´ early works are two pictures of the Virgin and Child in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. His most celebrated paintings are two large triptych altarpieces The Holy Kinship or St. Anne Altarpiece ordered for rthe church of Saint-Pieter in Louvain (1507-09) now in Brussels and The Entombment of the Lord (c. 1508-11) now in the Muséee Royal des Beaux-arts Antwerp both exhibitin strong religious feeling and precision of detail. His tendency to accentuate individual expression is demonstrated in such pictures as The Old Man and the Courtesan (Pourtalés Collection, Paris) and The Virgin in Prayer both in the Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, display serene dignity. Pictures with figures on a smaller scale are the polyptych in Munich, the scattered parts of which have been reassembled and Virgin and Child (Aynard Collection in Paris). His landscape backgrounds are in the style of one of his contemporaries Flemish artists Joachim Patinir who often supplied landscape settings for figure compositions painted by other Flemish artists. The Crucifixion (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) is believed to be the joint work of the two masters.

Massys painted portraits for Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII´s chancelor. Other portraits are in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut at FRankfurt, the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, the Palais Liechtenstein and the museums in Chicago and Oldenburg Germany.

Althoug his portraiture is more subjective and personal than that of Albrecht Dürer or Hans Holbein his´painting may have been influenced by both German masters. They visited him in Antwerp. Massys´lost St. Jerome in His Study of which a copy survives in VIenna is indebted to Dürer´s St. Jerome now in Lisbon.

Some Italian influence may also be detected as in Virgin and Child (Nationalmuseum, Poznan, Poland) in which the figures are obviously copied from Leonardo da Vinci´s Virgin of the Rocks in Louvre.

Massys´two sons were artists.
Jan Massys (1509-75) who became a master in the guild of Antwerp in 1531 was banished in n1543 for his heretical opinions, spent 15 years in Italy or France and returned to Antwerp in 1558. His early pictures were imitations of his father´s work but a half-length Judith with the Head of Holofernes of a later date, now in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston shows Italian or FRench influence as does Lot and His Daughters (1563, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna).
Cornelis Massys (1513-79) second son became a master painter in 1531 painting landscapes in his father´s style and also executing engravings.

The Money Changer and His Wife, painting by Quentin Massys, 1514, in the Louvre, Paris.