GOES, HUGO VAN DER (144o-1482), a painter of con siderable celebrity at Ghent, was known to Vasari, as he is known to us, by a single picture in a Florentine monastery. At a period when the family of the Medici had not yet risen from the rank of a great mercantile firm to that of a reigning dynasty, it employed as an agent at the port of Bruges Tommaso Portinari, a lineal descendant, it was said, of Folco, the father of Dante's Beatrix. Tommaso, at that time patron of a chapel in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova at Florence, ordered an altar-piece of Hugo van der Goes, and commanded him to illustrate the sacred theme of Quern genuit adoravit. In the centre of a vast triptych, comprising numerous figures of life size, Hugo represented the Virgin kneeling in adoration before the new-born Christ attended by Shepherds and Angels. On the wings he portrayed Tommaso and his two sons in prayer under the protection of Saint Anthony and St. Matthew, and Tommaso's wife and two daughters sup ported by St. Margaret and St. Mary Magdalen. The triptych, which has suffered much from decay and restoring, was for over 400 years at Santa Maria Nuova, and is now in the Uffizi Gallery.
There are also pieces in public galleries which claim to have been executed by Van der Goes: The "Madonna" at Frankfurt; the diptych representing the "Fall" and the "Deposition" at Vienna. These are probably early works. To a maturer period may be ascribed the precious little triptych in the Liechtenstein collec tion representing the "Adoration of the Magi" ; the two wings of and altar-piece from the Church of the Holy Trinity at Edinburgh now at Holyrood Castle; the "Death of the Virgin" at Bruges; the "Adoration of the Shepherds" at Wilton House. To his last years are ascribed two fine pictures painted on a large scale recently ac quired by the Berlin Gallery from Spain representing the "Nativity" and the "Adoration of the Magi." Van der Goes, how ever was not only a painter of easel pieces. He made his repu tation at Bruges by producing coloured hangings in distemper. After he settled at Ghent, and became a master of his gild in 1467, he designed cartoons for glass windows. He also made decorations for the wedding of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York in 1468, for the festivals of the Rhetoricians and papal jubilees on repeated occasions, for the solemn entry of Charles the Bold into Ghent in 1470-1471 and for the funeral of Philip the Good in 1474. About the year 1475 he retired to the monas tery of Rouge Cloitre near Brussels, where he took the cowl. There, though he still clung to his profession, he seems to have taken to drinking, and at one time to have shown decided symptoms of insanity. But his superiors gradually cured him of his intem perance, and he died in the odour of sanctity in 1482.
See Joseph Destree; H. v. d. Goes (1914) ; Max J. Friedlander, Hugo. v. der Goes (1926) ; Sir Martin Conway, The Van Eycks and their Followers (1921) .