Roger van der Weyden died at Brussels on the 18th of June 1464. He left several children. One of them, Peter, followed his father's calling; another, Corneille, after having made his studies at the University of Louvain, became a monk in the Carthusian Priory which the burghers of Brussels had recently founded at Scheut, by Anderlecht.

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Dierick Boudts

Dierick Boudts was born a few years later than Van der Weyden; the exact date of his birth is unknown, but it cannot have been much before 1420. He was a native of Haarlem, where at this time there was a flourishing school of painters noted for their beautiful landscape backgrounds, and for the care with which they executed their drapery. His father, who was also named Dierick, was one of them, and it was doubtless in his workshop that young Dierick Boudts received his artistic education.

For some reason or other, about the year 1445, he migrated to Louvain, where he soon found a wife in the person of Catherine van der Bruggen, the daughter of a well-to-do burgher family, who presently gave him three girls, who became nuns; two boys, Dierick and Albert, who followed their father's calling, and a large house in the Rue des Récollets—site now occupied by the Jesuit Church—which she inherited at the death of her parents (December 17, 1460). Here Dierick and his family took up their abode, and here it was that he painted his four most famous pictures—'The Last Supper' and 'The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus' at Saint Peter's, Louvain, and 'The Iniquitous Sentence of Otho' and 'Otho repairing his Injustice' in the Brussels Gallery.

Dierick was commissioned to paint the first two in 1464 by the rich confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament of Louvain, for Saint Peter's, where the brethren of the confraternity had two altars; the pictures were finished in 1468, and the quittance which the artist gave for the money he received for them is still in existence; and note, he signs his name not Dirk nor Thiery, as modern writers often style him, but Dierick Boudts. The Saint Erasmus altar-piece is a triptych; the central panel shows the martyrdom scene, the Gospel wing Saint Jerome and the Epistle wing an abbot, perhaps Saint Bernard. All three panels are still at Saint Peter's. The other altar-piece also had originally wings; on these were painted the First Celebration of the Passover, Elijah fed by Ravens, the Meeting of Abraham and Melchisedek, and the Israelites gathering Manna: the first two are now in the Berlin Gallery, and the others in the Pinakothek at Munich. The subject of the central panel is the Last Supper, and it still adorns the church for which it was painted.

The execution of these important works made Dierick's name famous. Hardly were they completed when the city fathers bestowed on him the honorary title of Portraiteur de la Ville, and commissioned him to paint for the Town Hall a triptych representing the Last Judgment, and four great panel paintings to be hung in the Justice Chamber, for the whole of which they agreed to pay him 500 florins. The triptych was finished in 1472; it has unhappily disappeared. Two years previously he had set to work on the first of the four panels, and shortly afterwards he received a visit from the city magistrates, who were so pleased with what he had done that they made him a present of wine of the value of 96 placken. The next thing we know of Dierick Boudts is that he lost his wife in 1472 or thereabout, and that shortly afterwards he married Elizabeth van Voshem, who was the widow of a rich butcher, and, as we have already seen, the sister-in-law of the glass painter Rombold Kelderman. By this lady he had no offspring, his union with her was not a long one. In the early spring of 1475 he seems to have been in enfeebled health, for on the 18th of April he chose the place in which he wished to be buried—beside his first wife, in the Church of the Récollets, and on the same day he made his will, which is still preserved. He left to Elisabeth Voshen all his real property, all his outstanding debts, and all his completed pictures; to each of his three daughters a trifling monthly allowance; and to his two sons a silver cup—the only thing, he says, which he himself had inherited from his father—the implements of his craft, and all his unfinished pictures, and before the summer was out he had gone the way of all flesh. Only two of the Town Hall paintings were completed. Dierick, indeed, had not had time even to begin the others, and presently the question arose, how much of the 500 florins was due to his executors? Whether there was any dispute about the matter we do not know, but it would seem that such was the case, for three years had elapsed before the account was settled, and at last the city fathers had had recourse to expert advice. We learn from the town accounts of 1478 that the sum of 376 florins 36 placken was in that year paid to Dierick's sons, and that this amount was the value of the pictures as estimated by 'the most notable painter in this land—to wit, he who was born in the city of Ghent, and now resideth in the Rooden Clooster, in Zuenien'—without doubt Hugo van der Goes, who had donned the cowl at Rouge Cloître two years before; and we learn, too, from the same source, that this man, during his sojourn in Louvain, lodged at the sign of The Angel, and that the city magistrates offered him a pot of Rhine wine.