Roger van der Weyden, the greatest of the immediate disciples of John van Eyck, was born at Tournai early in the fourteen hundreds. In 1436 he was appointed painter to the city of Brussels, and it was probably during this time that he adorned with gold and colour the statuary of the tomb of Jeanne of Brabant, which Philippe l'Asseuré erected in the Carmelite Church there. In 1450 he made a pilgrimage to Rome for the great jubilee which was celebrated during that year. We know something of the details of this journey. _En route_ he sojourned at Ferrara, at Milan and at Florence, and in all of these towns he received the most cordial welcome, not only from his brother artists, but from the ruling princes. At Ferrara he must have worked for Lionel d'Este, for on his return to Brussels we find him receiving from that prince the sum of twenty golden ducats in part payment for _certe depicture_ executed in his palace at Ferrara. At Milan he painted for Francesco Sforza a Calvary, with the portraits of Francesco himself, his wife, Blanche Visconti, and their young son, Galéas. This splendid picture is now in the _Musée des Beaux Arts_ at Brussels. At Florence he was employed by Cosmo de' Medici. The fruit of his labours in that city is at present in the Stadel Museum at Frankfort--a glorious triptych which represents the Madonna and Child, with St. Peter and St. John the Baptist, patrons of the city, on the right, and on the left the mighty Cosmo himself and one of his brothers, perhaps Lorenzo, in the guise of the patrons of the Medici family--Saints Cosmas and Damian. He does not seem to have practised his art in Rome. Perhaps his stay there was a short one, and that his time was fully occupied by sight-seeing and devotion. That he fully appreciated the art treasures of the Eternal City there can be no doubt, and we know that he was enraptured with the Lateran pictures of Gentile da Fabriano, whom he pronounced to be the first painter in Italy. During the later part of his life Roger seems to have resided at Bruges, and here perhaps he painted the Middelburg triptych now in the Berlin Gallery, and the missing triptych which formerly adorned the Church of St. Jacques. This picture excited the admiration of Albert Dürer when he visited Bruges in 1521. Its theme was the life of St. John the Baptist. The same subject is portrayed in a painting attributed to Roger, at present in the Berlin Gallery. Have we here the Bruges picture?