Jan Provoost
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Jan Provoost, or Jean Provost, or Jan Provost (1462/5, Mons–January 1529, Bruges) was a Flemish painter. He was one of the most famous Netherlandish painters of his generation, a prolific master who left his early workshop in Valenciennes to run two workshops, one in Bruges, where he was made a burgher in 1494, the other simultaneously in Antwerp, which was the economic center of the Low Countries. Provoost was also a cartographer engineer and architect. He met Albrecht Dürer in Antwerp in 1520, and a Dürer portrait drawing at the National Gallery, London, is conjectured to be of Provoost. He married the widow of the miniaturist and painter Simon Marmion, after whose death he inherited the considerable Marmion estate.
The styles of Gerard David and Hans Memling can be detected in Provoost's religious paintings. The Last Judgement painted for the Bruges town hall in 1525 is the only painting for which documentary evidence identifies Provoost. Surprising discoveries can still be made: in 1971 an unknown and anonymous panoramic Crucifixion from the village church at Koolkerke was identified as Provoost's. It is on permanent loan to the Groeninge Museum, Bruges, which has several works of Provoost: a retrospective exhibition is scheduled for 2008–9.
Selected works
- Crucifixion ca 1495 Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Crucifixion ca 1500 Groeningemuseum, Bruges
- The Virgin in Glory, ca 1524 Hermitage Museum
- The Last Judgment Detroit Institute of Arts
- Virgin and Child, attributed, National Gallery, London
- Last Judgment for the Bruges town hall, 1525 Groeningemuseum, Bruges
- Saint John the Baptist and a Canon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes
