Jaume Huguet: 5 works

'According to the documentary sources it seems that the young Jaume Huguet started out as a painter by the side of his uncle Pere Huguet who worked professionally in the Tarragona workshop of Mateu Ortoneda. In 1448 he set up his home in Barcelona, where he came into contact with the realistic 'ars nova' of Flemish influence, especially of the pictorial school of Jan van Eyck, made fashionable a few years earlier by the painter Lluís Dalmau with the altarpiece of the Virgin of the Councillors in the chapel of the Casa de la Ciutat in Barcelona, now in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.'

'Five compartments were painted by Jaume Huguet, 3 by the Master of Castelsardo and another by an anonymous painter.'

'In 1463 the Guild of Tanners commissioned an altarpiece from Jaume Huguet for the high altar in the church of Sant Agustí Vell in Barcelona.'

'In 1448 he set up his home in Barcelona, where he came into contact with the realistic 'ars nova' of Flemish influence, especially of the pictorial school of Jan van Eyck, made fashionable a few years earlier by the painter Lluís Dalmau with the altarpiece of the Virgin of the Councillors in the chapel of the Casa de la Ciutat in Barcelona, now in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.'

'This small altarpiece allows us to appreciate in detail the hatching technique characteristic of Jaume Huguet, which consisted in the application first of a plain ink base over which he made small parallel brushstrokes of different colours that, according to Ainaud, he could have learnt by studying the work of Bernat Martorell. Nevertheless this is a work in which one can discern the less skilful hand of a collaborator from his workshop at a time that, despite corresponding to the artist's period of greatest maturity, also coincided with the onset of the period of maximum production.'