Hugo van der Goes

Timeline

1. 1467–1474Ghent · GhentHe joined the Ghent painters' guild in 1467 under the sponsorship of Joos van Wassenhove. In 1468 in Bruges he made festive decorations for the wedding of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York, and painted heraldry and indulgence celebrations for the city of Ghent and the Burgundian court. After van Wassenhove left for Italy in 1470, Hugo became Ghent's leading living painter.
2. 1474–1477Ghent · GhentHe served consecutively as guild warden from 1474 to 1476, at the height of his career. During this period he painted the Portinari Altarpiece (Uffizi) for Tommaso Portinari, manager of the Medici bank in Bruges; the center panel shows the Nativity and the adoration of the shepherds, the wings the donor's family. A few years after its completion it arrived in 1483 at the church of Sant'Egidio in the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, where the shepherds' rugged faces influenced Ghirlandaio and others.
3. 1477–1482Red Cloister · BrusselsAround 1477 he closed his Ghent workshop and entered the Red Cloister as a lay brother, permitted to continue taking commissions and to drink. The chronicle of the monk Gaspar Ofhuys records that he received visitors such as Archduke Maximilian. In 1482, returning from Cologne with a brother of the cloister, he was seized by religious melancholy and attempted suicide; sent back to the cloister he died soon after. Late works such as the Death of the Virgin in Bruges are often linked to this period.