Malouel Jean
(b ?Nijmegen c. 1365; d Dijon, 12 March 1415).
North Netherlandish painter, active in Burgundy. He was the son of the heraldic artist
Willem Maelwael and uncle of the Limbourg brothers. First recorded as a painter
in 1382, he is then documented on 20 September 1396 for a commission to provide
designs for textiles with decorative armorial bearings for Queen Isabeau of
Bavaria, wife of Charles VI, for which he received payment on 27 March 1397. By
5 August 1397 he was in Dijon, where he succeeded Jean de Beaumetz as court
painter and Valet de Chambre to Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Malouel was
highly paid, and his annual pension was considerably more than that of Beaumetz
or of the sculptor Claus Sluter. One of the first works Malouel produced for the
Duke was a painting of the Apostles with St Anthony (untraced), paid for
on 11 November 1398, which the Duke is known to have kept in his private
oratory. On 18 March 1398 wooden supports were purchased for Malouel to paint
five large altarpieces for the Charterhouse of Champmol, outside Dijon. The
subject-matter of the paintings is not specified in the document, although the
dimensions of the panels are given. The Martyrdom of St Denis (Paris,
Louvre) has been identified as one of these five panels, on the basis of its
possible provenance and its dimensions, which correspond approximately to those
given in the document. In May 1416, however, Henri Bellechose received pigments
to ‘perfect’ a painting of the Life of St Denis, and this document, in
conjunction with the earlier one, has been interpreted to suggest that
Bellechose completed a work left unfinished by Malouel. A rereading of the 1398
document and the absence of any discernible evidence of collaboration on the
St Denis panel has led to its attribution to Henri Bellechose alone.