Rogier van der Weyden (Dutch: [roːˈɣiːr vɑn dər ˈʋɛidə(n)]; 1399 or 1400 – 18 June 1464), initially known as Roger de le Pasture (French: [ʁɔʒe d(ə) la pastyʁ]), 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 aristocrats.

His reputation was slowly rebuilt during the 200 years that followed; today he is known, with Robert Campin and van Eyck, as the third (by birth date) of the three great Early Netherlandish artists (Vlaamse Primitieven or "Flemish Primitives"), and widely as the most influential Northern painter of the 15th century.

[6] The Pasture family had earlier settled in the city of Tournai where Rogier's father worked as a maître-coutelier (knife manufacturer).

It is known that the city council of Tournai offered eight pitchers of wine in honour of a certain 'Maistre Rogier de le Pasture' on 17 November 1426.

[8] However, on 5 March of the following year, the records of the painters' guild show a "Rogelet de le Pasture" entered the workshop of Robert Campin together with Jacques Daret.

The final mention of Rogier de la Pasture in the financial records of Tournai, on 21 October 1435, lists him as demeurrant à Brouxielles ("living in Brussels").

[12] Further testimony of his philanthropy is van der Weyden's position as administrator of the hospital and charitable foundation Ter Kisten of the Beguine convent in Brussels between 1455 and 1457.

According to some sources, in 1449 Rogier went to Italy,[14] and in the holy year 1450 quite possibly made a pilgrimage to Rome, which brought him in contact with Italian artists and patrons.

After interventions from both the Duke of Burgundy and the Dauphin of France, the future Louis XI, Rogier van der Weyden was persuaded to accept the request of Bianca Maria Visconti, Duchess of Milan, that her court painter Zanetto Bugatto go to Brussels to become an apprentice in his workshop.

Van der Weyden died on 18 June 1464 at Brussels, and was buried in St. Catherine's Chapel of the Cathedral of St. Michael and St.

[17] In his catalogue raisonné of van der Weyden, the Belgian art historian Dirk de Vos agrees with Campbell about the authenticity of these three paintings.

[19] Rogier's apprenticeship under Campin instilled a number of preoccupations, most noticeably his approach to feminine beauty, which was often expressed both through the elegant form of the model herself as well as her dress.

Both emphasised the vivacity of their model's character by contrasting them against dark flat backgrounds and throwing strong light from the near left hand side.

It can be traced back to a geographical error in Vasari's Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori where he states that the artist 'Rugiero da Brugia' lived in Bruges.

[15] Châtelet explains how the Brussels archivist Alphonse Walters discovered in 1846 that there was a Rogier van der Weyden who lived in Brussels but that he had died earlier than stated in the Schilder-Boeck; this led Alfred Michiels to claim that there were two Rogier van der Weyden painters, a father and son.

He is first mentioned in historical records in 1427 when, relatively late in life, he studied painting under Campin during 1427–32, and soon outshone his master and, later, even influenced him.

The fragment of the London National Gallery's The Magdalen Reading has been described by Campbell as "one of the great masterpieces of fifteenth-century art and among Rogier's most important early works".

[26] Since the 1970s, this painting has been linked to two small heads in the collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon), of Saint Catherine and of St Joseph.

It is now widely believed that these three fragments came from the same large altarpiece depicting the "Virgin and Child with Saints", partly recorded in a later drawing now in Stockholm.

Panofsky writes how Rogier van der Weyden introduced new religious iconography in his painting; he depicted patrons participating in sacred events and combined half-portraits of the Madonna with portraits of people in prayer to form diptychs.

Van der Weyden had also a large influence on the German painter and engraver Martin Schongauer whose prints were distributed all over Europe from the last decades of the 15th century.