Petrus Christus

Petrus Christus was born in Baarle and became a citizen of Bruges in 1444, three years after Jan van Eyck's death. Until Hans Memling arrived he was the city's leading painter, working in a precise manner indebted to Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. He was among the first Northern painters to build a picture on a single vanishing point, and he set sitters in real rooms rather than against flat backgrounds, as in his Portrait of a Carthusian.