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Quentin Matsys, also known as Quentin Massys,
Quentin Metsys or Kwinten Metsys (1466 - 1530),
was a painter in the Flemish tradition, founder of
the Antwerp school. He was born at Leuven, where
he first learned a mechanical art.

His works include A Portrait of an Elderly Man
(1513), The Money Changer and His Wife (1514), and
The Ugly Duchess (1515).

The Ugly Duchess is perhaps the best-known of his
works. It served as a basis for Sir John Tenniel's
depiction of the Ugly Duchess in Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland. It  is probably not a
depiction of any one model, though it is sometimes
said to be a portrait of Margaret, Duchess of
Carinthia, also known as Margaret Maultasch
("Satchel-mouth").

During the greater part of the 15th century the
centres in which the painters of the Low Countries
most congregated were Bruges, Ghent and Brussels.
Towards the close of the same period Leuven took a
prominent part in giving employment to workmen of
every craft. It was not till the opening of the
16th century that Antwerp usurped he lead which it
afterwards maintained against Bruges and Ghent,
Brussels, Mechelen and Leuven.

Quintin Matsys was one of the first men of any
note who gave repute to the gild of Antwerp. A
legend relates how the smith of Leuven was induced
by affection for the daughter of an artist to
change his trade and acquire proficiency in
painting. A less poetic but perhaps more real
version of the story tells that Quintin had a
brother with whom he was brought up by his father
Josse Matsys, a smith, who held the lucrative
offices of clockmaker and architect to the
municipality of Leuven. It came to be a question
which of the sons should follow the paternal
business, and which carve out a new profession for
himself. Josse the son elected to succeed his
father, and Quintin then gave himself to the study
of painting.

We are not told expressly by whom Quintin was
taught, but his style seems necessarily derived
from the lessons of Dieric Bouts, who took to
Leuven the mixed art of Hans Memlinc|Memlinc and
Roger van der Weyden|Van der Weyden. When he
settled at Antwerp, at the age of twenty-five, he
probably had a style with an impress of its own,
which certainly contributed most importantly to
the revival of Flemish art on the lines of Van
Eyck and Van der Weyden.

What particularly characterizes Quintin Matsys is
the strong religious feeling which he inherited
from earlier schools. But that again was permeated
by realism which frequently degenerated into the
grotesque. Nor would it be too much to say that
the facial peculiarities of the boors of Jan
Steen|Van Steen or Adriaen van Ostade|Ostade have
their counterparts in the pictures of Matsys, who
was not, however, trained to use them in the same
homely way. From Van der Weyden's example we may
trace the dryness of outline and shadeless
modelling and the pitiless finish even of trivial
detail, from the Van Eyck's and Memlinc through
Dierick Bouts the superior glow and richness of
transparent pigments, which mark the pictures of
Matsys.

The date of his retirement from Leuven is 1491,
when he became a master in the gild of painters at
Antwerp. His most celebrated picture is that which
he executed in 1508 for the joiners' company in
the cathedral of his adopted city. Next in
importance to that is the Marys of Scripture round
the Virgin and Child, which was ordered for a
chapel in the cathedral of Leuven. Both
altar-pieces are now in public museums, one at
Antwerp, the other at Brussels. They display great
earnestness in expression, great minuteness of
finish, and a general absence of effect by light
or shade. As in early Flemish pictures, so in
those of Matsys, superfluous care is lavished on
jewelry, edgings and ornament.



To the great defect of want of atmosphere such
faults may be added as affectation, the result of
excessive straining after tenderness in women, or
common gesture and grimace suggested by a wish to
render pictorially the brutality of gaolers and
executioners. Yet in every instance an effort is
manifest to develop and express individual
character. This tendency in Matsys is chiefly
illustrated in his pictures of male and female
market bankers (Louvre and Windsor
Castle|Windsor), in which an attempt is made to
display concentrated cupidity and avarice. The
other tendency to excessive emphasis of tenderness
may be seen in two replicas of the Virgin and
Child at Berlin and Amsterdam, where the ecstatic
kiss of the mother is quite unreal. But in these
examples there is a remarkable glow of colour
which makes up for many defects.

Expression of despair is strongly exaggerated in a
Lacretia at the museum of Vienna. On the whole the
best pictures of Matsys are the quietest; his
Virgin and Christ or Ecce Homo and Mater Dolorosa
(London and Antwerp) display as much serenity and
dignity as seems consistent with the masters art.
He had considerable skill as a portrait painter.
Egidius at Longford, which drew from Sir Thomas
More a eulogy in Latin verse, is but one of a
numerous class, to which we may add the portrait
of Maximilian of Austria in the gallery of
Amsterdam. Matsys in this branch of practice was
much under the influence of his contemporaries
Lucas van Leyden|Lucas of Leiden and Jan
Mabuse|Mabuse.

His tendency to polish excluded to some extent the
subtlety of modulation remarkable in Hans Holbein
the Elder|Holbein and Albrecht Dürer|Dürer.
There is reason to think that he was well
acquainted with both these German masters. He
probably met Holbein more than once on his way to
England. He saw Dürer at Antwerp in 1520.  Matsys
also became the guardian of Joachim
Patinir|Joachim Patinir's children after the death
of this painter, with whom he had colloborated.

Matsys died at Antwerp in 1530.

The puritan feeling which slumbered in him was
fatal to some of his relatives. His sister
Catherine and her husband suffered at Leuven in
1543 for the then capital offence of reading the
Bible, he being decapitated, she buried alive in
the square fronting the cathedral.

Quentin's son, Jan Matsys, inherited the art but
not the skill of his parent. The earliest of his
works, a St Jerome, dated 1537, in the gallery of
Vienna, the latest, a Healing of Tobias, of 1564,
in the museum of Antwerp, are sufficient evidence
of his tendency to substitute imitation for
original thought. Another son, Cornelis Matsys,
was also a painter.  

==See also==
* Early Renaissance painting
* List of Belgian painters

1911