Simon Bening

[5] Many of his finest works are Labours of the Months for Books of Hours which are largely small-scale landscapes, at that time a nascent genre of painting.

In other respects his style is relatively little developed beyond that of the years before his birth, but his landscapes serve as a link between the 15th-century illuminators and Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

He produced books for German rulers, like Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, and royalty like Emperor Charles V and Don Fernando, the Infante of Portugal.

Robert de Clercq, abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Ter Duinen ("Les Dunes") at Koksijde, near Bruges, commissioned a Benedictional from him sometime between 1519 and 1529.

[6] Bening’s usage of illusionism, pictorial narrative and creative adaptation demonstrates his influence from the leading illuminators, printmakers and painters of his near contemporaries such as Jan van Eyck, Mary of Burgundy, Martin Schongauer, Gerard David, and Albrecht Dürer.