Wilhelm of Herle
Dutch painter
Wilhelm of Herle (born in Herle in Dutch Limburg at an unknown date in the fourteenth century; time and place of death unknown) was a painter.
According to the statements of deeds of that period he was active in Cologne from 1358 for some fifteen or twenty years. In 1370 he was paid for paintings that he had made for the liber juramentorum of the city. Also remains of frescoes from the town hall that are now preserved in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum can certainly be traced to him. It is generally supposed that a painter, Wilhelm of Cologne, mentioned in the Limburg Chronicle as "the best painter in German lands" is Wilhelm of Herle, and it has been customary to attribute to him some of the best work in painting of early Cologne, although there is no absolute proof in any one case.
His pupil and assistant was Wynrich of Wesel, and art historian Johann Matthias Firmenich-Richartz, in particular, has ascribed to Wynrich pictures attributed to Wilhelm, although Carl Aldenhoven and others have protested against this attribution. It is difficult to distinguish the work of Wilhelm from that of the school he founded. The most important paintings about which there is question are the Madonna with the Bean-Blossom and its variant the Madonna with the Pea-Blossom and the accompanying pictures on the wing-panels of St. Catherine and St. Elizabeth (Cologne and Nuremberg).
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This entry incorporates text from “Wilhelm of Herle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.