Grégoire Guérard

The Arrest of Christ, c. 1520-1522, Dijon, musée des Beaux-Arts Grégoire Guérard or the Master of the Autun Triptych was a Dutch painter active from 1512 to 1538 at Troyes and in Burgundy and Bresse.

Life Possibly born in Breda or Utrecht, he was stated to be "from Holland ... a relation of Erasmus of Rotterdam" by the historian Pierre de Saint-Julien de Balleure in his 1581 De l'origine des Bourgongnons. Nothing is known of his youth, but he may have trained among glass painters, for example on the building site of Tournai Cathedral around 1500, in Arnoult of Nijmegen's team.

He is recorded as being in Troyes in 1512, the date at which he painted Penitent Saint Peter for the Madeleine church there, producing a stained glass window of the Tree of Jesse for the same church. The same year he produced a large painting of Christ Bearing the Cross, now divided between the Goya Museum in Castres, the National Renaissance Museum in Écouen, the Musée Rolin in Autun and the Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers. It inspired a print by Israhel Van Meckenem, itself reversing a composition by Martin Schongauer.

Around 1515, he may have planned a stay in Italy, travelling through the Duchy of Burgundy. He stayed at Autun, where he painted his masterpiece, the Eucharist Triptych (musée Rolin), commissioned by Jean Petit-Jean for a chapel dedicated to saints Baudèles, Yves and Privat in Autun Cathedral. It shows his North European training as well as early Italian influences, such as from Fra Bartolomeo's Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, which had been offered to Autun Cathedral in 1512 and which he would have seen there.

Saint Jerome Triptych, 1518, Bourg-en-Bresse, Musée de Brou. He probably stayed in Italy around 1515-1518, possibly in Florence and Rome, meeting and befriending fellow Fleming Bartholomeus Pons. The stay profoundly influenced his style. On returning from Rome he settled in Tournus, where he was recorded in 1518 - the register of the painters' guild in Haarlem shows that Pons was lodging "in Tornis in the house [of] master Guerad".