The Sherborne Almshouse Triptych

The Sherborne Almshouse Triptych by the Master of the Sherborne Almshouse Triptych, painted around 1485 and still preserved in the Sherborne Almshouse in Sherborne, Dorset, is the name-work of this enigmatic painter and one of the rare examples of a late medieval English or English-context panel painting surviving in its original institutional setting. The Almshouse of Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist in Sherborne was founded in the fifteenth century to house elderly poor residents, and the triptych was commissioned as a devotional altarpiece for the almshouse chapel. The painting combines Flemish naturalistic conventions — familiar from imported Netherlandish altarpieces in English ecclesiastical collections — with the specific devotional needs of an English almshouse community. Its survival in situ makes it a uniquely precious document of late medieval English devotional life and institutional patronage.

The triptych presents the central devotional subject flanked by narrative or saintly wings in the format standard for Flemish devotional altarpieces adapted to an English context. The master's Flemish-influenced technique achieves the oil glazing depth and figure quality characteristic of the imported tradition, deployed here for a distinctly English charitable institution.