Dieric Bouts (born c. 1415, Haarlem, Holland [now in the Netherlands]—died May 6, 1475, Louvain, Brabant [now Leuven, Belgium]) was a northern Netherlandish painter who, while lacking the grace of expression and intellectual depth of his contemporaries Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck, was an accomplished master.
Little is known of Bouts’s early years in Haarlem, although it is possible that he studied in Brussels with Rogier, whose influence is obvious in his early works. In 1448 Bouts visited Louvain in the southern Netherlands, where he married the daughter of a local merchant. After 1457 his name appeared almost every year in the archives of Louvain. Bouts’s earlier works, dated on stylistic evidence before 1457, are strongly Rogierian in their expression of intense emotion through symbolic gestures. Passionate subjects such as The Entombment, Pietà, and scenes of the Crucifixion, the Deposition from the Cross, and the Resurrection depicted in an impressive triptych in the Royal Chapel in Granada, Spain, were appropriate vehicles for this expression. Bouts’s lack of realism in anatomy, however, and his stiff and angular compositions may well reflect the sober religious intensity of the northern Netherlands as much as any deficiency in skill or feeling. The overall design of Bouts’s early works shows the influence of the elegant and intellectual van Eyck.
In the paintings ascribed to Bouts’s mature period after he settled in Louvain, Rogier’s influence gives way to a greater severity and dignity in the treatment of figures; there is a shift toward grander, more allegorical subjects as well. The facial expressions of the figures in those paintings show an extraordinary restraint that appears as a deliberately controlled intensity with great spiritual effect. Bouts’s two best-known works, which exemplify his mature style, belong to the last 20 years of his life. One, ordered by the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament for the Church of St. Peter in Louvain in 1464, is a triptych, the two side panels of which are divided in half horizontally. The central panel represents the Last Supper, and the side panels show four scenes from the Hebrew Bible that foreshadow the institution of the Eucharist, the ritual commemoration of the Last Supper: the Feast of the Passover, Elijah in the Desert, the Gathering of Manna, and Abraham and Melchizedek. The second painting, commissioned by the city of Louvain in 1468, the year in which Bouts became official painter to the city, was to be an ambitious project on the theme of the Last Judgment, but the work remained uncompleted at Bouts’s death. Panels representing heaven and hell survive, as well as two thematically related panels illustrating an episode from the legend of the Holy Roman emperor Otto III.