Saint James and Saint Clare

Robert Campin's Saint James and Saint Clare, panel wings from a dismembered altarpiece, demonstrate the sculptor-like solidity with which he endowed his saints — figures that seem carved from stone rather than painted on wood. Saint James the Greater, shown with his pilgrim's shell and staff, and Saint Clare of Assisi, the founder of the Poor Clares, are rendered with the precise physiognomic attention and volumetric mass that distinguish Campin's style from the more linear International Gothic conventions of his contemporaries.

The saints are rendered with Campin's characteristic sculptural solidity and attention to material textures, their robes and attributes painted with the meticulous observation of surfaces that distinguishes early Netherlandish panel painting.