Josse Lieferinxe


Josse Lieferinxe was a South Netherlandish painter, formerly known by the pseudonym the Master of St. Sebastian.
Originating in the diocese of Cambrai in Hainaut, then part of the territories ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy, Josse Lieferinxe was documented as a "Picard" in the regions of Avignon and Marseille at the end of the fifteenth and in the early sixteenth centuries. He was first mentioned in Provence in 1493. Thus he figures among the painters of the Provençal school, whose most prominent members in an earlier generation had also been from the far north of the French-speaking world—Barthélemy d'Eyck and Enguerrand Quarton. In 1503 he married Michelle, a daughter of Jean Changenet, the most prominent painter of Avignon, in whose atelier Lieferinxe may have matured his style. He was last mentioned living in 1505, and in 1508 as deceased.
Before he was identified by Charles Sterling who linked his work with a document, his artistic personality was recognized, as the "Master of St. Sebastian", through a former retable of eight scenes depicting the acts and miracles of Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch, protectors against the plague, which was commissioned in 1497 for the church of Nôtre Dame des Accoulés in Marseille. Bernardino Sismondi, who originally received the commission, died, however, before he could finish the work. By the early twentieth century the panels had become widely dispersed in museums. Panels from a Life of the Virgin were also identified with the anonymous Sebastian master: two panels painted on both sides in the Musée Calvet, Avignon—a Circumcision backed by a Saint Catherine and an Annunciation backed by Saint Michael Killing the Dragon—and another, a Marriage of the Virgin in the Musées Royaux, Brussels; a fragmentary third panel, also painted on both sides, is in the Musée du Louvre.

Selected works

A more complete list can be found in the