The Beaune Altarpiece is a large polyptych c. 1443–1451 altarpiece by the Early Netherlandish artist Rogier van der Weyden, painted in oil on oak panels with parts later transferred to canvas. It consists of fifteen paintings on nine panels, of which six are painted on both sides. Unusually for the period, it retains some of its original frames.
The Beaune Altarpiece, c. 1443–1451. 220cm x 548cm (excluding frames). Oil on oak, Hospices de Beaune, interior view
The view with the wings folded of six panels with the donors kneeling in the far wings
Courtyard of the Hôtel-Dieu
Patients of the Hotel-Dieu in their Beds, folio 77, 1482, Livre de vie active, by Jehan Henry, shows nurses attending the dying in a Paris hospital. Patients are two to a bed, except for a dying woman.
Rogier van der Weyden or Roger de la Pasture was an early Netherlandish painter whose surviving works consist mainly of religious triptychs, altarpieces, and commissioned single and diptych portraits. He was highly successful in his lifetime; his paintings were exported to Italy and Spain, and he received commissions from, amongst others, Philip the Good, Netherlandish nobility, and foreign princes. By the latter half of the 15th century, he had eclipsed Jan van Eyck in popularity. However his fame lasted only until the 17th century, and largely due to changing taste, he was almost totally forgotten by the mid-18th century. His reputation was slowly rebuilt during the 200 years that followed; today he is known, with Robert Campin and van Eyck, as the third of the three great Early Flemish artists, and widely as the most influential Northern painter of the 15th century.
Rogier van der Weyden
Imaginative portrait by Cornelis Cort, 1572
The Descent from the Cross (c. 1435), oil on oak panel, 220 × 262 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid
Portrait of a Woman with a Winged Bonnet, c. 1440. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.