Wilton Diptych - Authorship

Authorship

The artist, sometimes referred to as the "Wilton Master", has never been identified, or associated with other panel paintings, and the closest resemblances to his style come in some illuminated manuscripts from the 1410s. At this period it was common in Northern Europe for panel paintings, still made in very small numbers, to be made by artists with a background in illumination. The date of the painting, at a time when the International Gothic style was at its most similar in several courts in Europe, makes identifying the nationality of its painter more difficult. It is possible that the painter was English, but apart from the Westminster portrait of Richard, now unlike the Diptych much overpainted, there are too few comparable works to establish in what style the recorded English painters worked.

The artist has been proposed as coming from "every possible nation", but France seems the most likely, with Italy another possibility, and some art historians point to the possibility of a Bohemian artist, perhaps brought to England by Richard II's first wife, Anne of Bohemia. The exquisite quality of the painting is thought by most art historians to indicate that the artist was probably from northern France. It shows similarities to the manuscript painting of Pol de Limbourg, but like the other surviving portrait of Richard, in Westminster Abbey, is also closely related in themes to paintings made in Prague for Anne's father Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and her brother Wenceslas, King of the Romans.