LORNE CAMPBELL was born in Stirling in 1946 and was educated at Edinburgh University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1973.He was a Lecturer at Manchester University from 1970 to 1971, Speelman Fellow in Dutch and Flemish Art at Wolfson College, Cambridge University, from 1971 to 1974 and from 1974 has been a Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute. He is the author, with Colin Thompson, of Hugo van der Goes and the Trinity Panels in Edinburgh, and he has contributed articles to The Burlington Magazine,The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, The Connoisseur and the Bulletin des Musees Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique. Dr Campbell is currently a Curator at the National Gallery, London.

ONE OF THE MOST powerful and perhaps the most influential of all fifteenth-century European masters, Rogier van der Weyden emerged from scholarly and critical neglect only with the revival of interest in the so-called 'Flemish Primitives' during the second half of the nineteenth century. The immensely forceful,frequently disturbing, images which Van der Weyden produced owed as much to his supreme control of paint as they did to his observation of detail, which despite an almost clinical obsessiveness was never permitted to dominate the general rhythm and pattern of the picture itself. These qualities fused to create a style with a direct impact but one which was the result of only the most subtle and painstaking calculations of colour and balance. The drama inherent in the subjectmatter of Van der Weyden's greatest paintings is thus heightened to produce images of intense emotion so that the agony of The Descent from the Cross and the horrors and glories of The Last Judgement become searingly palpable.

Lorne Campbell disentangles many of the threads of a career which, although brilliantly successful, is so scantily documented that much of the personality and the development of one of the most eminent painters of the fifteenth century remains mysterious. Of his contemporary renown there is no doubt, and Dr Campbell explores Van der Weyden's position both as official painter to the city of Brussels and within the international system of princely patronage which was evolving during his lifetime. Starting from a core of securely attributed works, Dr Campbell uses documentary evidence and stylistic analysis to construct a comprehensible and consistent corpus of Van der Weyden's surviving oeuvre. His lucid and succinct study will long stand not only as a model for approaching the problems of fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting but also as a basic and comprehensive introduction to the achievement of a master whose images, with their unnerving immediacy of presentation, seem to have a special appeal for the our times.