Jan Joest van Kalkar

The factual record concerning the painter Jan Joest van Kalkar is limited. Efforts by archivists and art historians to construct a definitive biography – relying on archival documentation and stylistic analysis – have produced conflicting and sometimes confusing theories that remain largely unresolved¹. Given the commonality of the name ‘Jan’ in the Low Countries and neighbouring Lower Rhine region, it cannot be confirmed that all documents believed to refer to him refer to the same individual.

Probably born between 1470 and 1480, Jan Joest was not yet thirty when he received his first major commissions. The oeuvre has been grouped around Jan Joest’s only documented work²: the painting of the wings of the monumental carved altarpiece depicting the Passion of Christ, commissioned for the high altar of Saint Nicolai Church in Kalkar. At the end of the 15th century, Kalkar was a prosperous commercial City of the Hanseatic within the Duchy of Cleves, situated near the river Rhine with close connection to Cologne. The altarpiece was ordered by Kalkar’s distinguished Confraternity of Our Lady in 1488, with an unusually extensive set of documents detailing its complex creation³.

In 1488, representatives of the City – including the Mayor and the pastor of Saint Nicolai – joined members of the Confraternity in visiting churches in Wesel, Zuphten, and Deventer to identify an appropriate model for their commission. They invited Master Arnt of Zwolle, a renowned carver, to discuss the project, eventually offering him a contract to carve the figures in 1489/90. Following Arnt’s death in 1492 and the unfinished status of the altarpiece, the Confraternity contracted Ludwig Juppe, a sculptor from Marburg in Hessen, who completed the carvings in 1501.

During this period, the Confraternity approached Derick Baegert of Wesel (1440-1515), the preeminent painter in the lower Rhine at the time, regarding painting the altarpiece’s wings; both he and his son Jan declined. Subsequently, Jan Joest was commissioned in 1505/6 to paint the lateral wings, which were completed in 1508. It has been suggested that Jan Joest hailed from Wesel and was related to Baegert, possibly apprenticing under him, but documentary evidence for these claims remains inconclusive. While certain elements in some of the twenty scenes in Kalkar reflect Baegert’s influence, others demonstrate clear inspiration from Bruges (Gerard David), Ghent (Joos van Wassenhove), Antwerp, and paintings in the Northern Netherlandish. Before accepting the Kalkar commission, Jan Joest, along with his workshop, must have spent time in the Burgundian Netherlands.

On stylistic grounds, the altarpiece of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin in Palencia Cathedral, dated 1505, has been attributed to Jan Joest van Kalkar. The bishop Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca likely commissioned it during his 1504 visit to Brussels. Payment records reference a Juan de Holande, who may or may not correspond to a similarly named painter in Brussels at that time. Although the name “Jan of Holland” alone does not conclusively establish authorship, stylistic similarities – particularly the advanced use of light in Christ among the Doctors – support the attribution⁴.

In Kalkar, Jan Joest benefited from two notably talented assistants in his workshop. One was Joos van Cleve, whose portrait appears in The Raising of Lazarus; this is one of several contemporary likenesses included in Joest’s Kalkar paintings. Joos, originally bearing the surname Van der Beke, was referred to as “van Cleve” in the Antwerp painters’ guild, indicating origins in Kleve, located approximately 15 km west of Kalkar. The other assistant, Barthel Bruyn the Elder – who may have married Joest’s daughter – would go on to become a leading Renaissance painter in Cologne and to receive significant church commissions throughout the Lower Rhine⁵.

Jan Joest and his workshop painted about 20 scenes: ten scenes from the Infancy of Christ and event from his later life can be seen on the exterior, the remaining scenes on the interior depict scenes from the Passion that had not been carved⁶. A second set of wings – a typical feature of German altarpieces of the time – remain unpainted.

Soon after completing the commission in Kalkar, Jan Joest seems to have left for the Netherlands and moved to Haarlem around 1509. A painter named Jan Joest is recorded to have gilded a statue of Virgo in Sole and acquired a house in 1510. He was eventually buried in St Bavo in 1519. If he was the same person than the painter Jan Jodocus of Wesel, who in 1512 received the commission to paint the high-altarpiece for the Benedictine Abbey of Werden, near Dortmund, is unclear. Since the altarpiece has not survived, this seems highly likely, since his wings in Kalkar must have been much admired – it ultimately can not be verified. An argument for the identity is the fact that in 1519 a painter named Bartholemy – possibly Barthel Bruyn – presented a costly ceremonial garment known as tabbart to the Church St. Willibrod in Wesel in the name of the deceased painter Jan Joest⁷.

In the 18^th century, the painted wings of a monumental altarpiece in the Church of Saint Nicolai in Kalkar were erroneously believed to have been painted by Jan Stephan van Calcar, a painter who travelled to Italy and died in Naples in 1546. Only in the early 19^th century, when Early Netherlandish Painting was slowly rediscovered, the extraordinary quality of the paintings in Kalkar were understood and led to the rediscovery of the artist.