Panels from the High Altar of the Charterhouse of Saint-Honoré, Thuison-les-Abbeville: Saint John the Baptist (c. 1495): Artwork and History

Panels from the High Altar of the Charterhouse of Saint-Honoré, Thuison-les-Abbeville: Saint John the Baptist (c. 1495) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as French; Picardy.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

The Virgin and Child and Saint John the Baptist panels once served as exterior wings for an altarpiece at the Carthusian monastery in Thuison-les-Abbeville, France, formerly part of the Burgundian Netherlands. The figures of the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Baptist appear within shallow stone niches painted to look like the Gothic architecture of a church, with pointed arches and tracery. These enshrined images of Mary and John celebrated the monastery as the site of some of their relics (human remains or objects said to belong to the saints), which were often housed in architectural containers.

Object facts

• Title: Panels from the High Altar of the Charterhouse of Saint-Honoré, Thuison-les-Abbeville: Saint John the Baptist
• Date: c. 1495
• Artist attribution: French; Picardy
• Place of origin: France
• Medium: Oil on panel
• Dimensions: Panel: 117 × 52 cm (46 1/16 × 20 1/2 in.); Framed: 137.2 × 69.8 cm (54 × 27 1/2 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1933.1055

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.