Melchior Broederlam

From 1381 he was court painter to Louis de Mâle, Duke of Brabant, and from Louis's death in 1384 worked for his son-in-law and successor, Philip the Bold, although he remained based in Ypres, doing much work, mostly decorative, at Philip's now vanished chateau at Hesdin, which was full of elaborate mechanical devices, of what we might today call a fairground nature, which needed painting.

Although the perspective is far from fully developed, light and shadow are used to create a sense of depth in a very advanced fashion, and the realistic depiction of Saint Joseph was to become characteristic of Netherlandish painting.

The buildings in the Annunciation combine Romanesque and Gothic areas, probably intended to contrast the Old and New Testaments, in a visual metaphor that was to become characteristic of Eyckian painting.

[6] The panels contain much of the contemporary International Gothic but also "announce a new world of naturalism and disguised symbolism that will be further refined in the works of his successors in the Netherlands.

[8] In particular six scenes (two panels are painted on both sides) from an altarpiece from Champmol, now equally divided between Antwerp and Baltimore, have often been attributed to him, although iconographic and stylistic details suggest a Mosan origin.