The Presentation in the Temple

The Master of Liesborn was an anonymous Westphalian painter active in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, named for the Benedictine abbey of Liesborn in Westphalia whose high altarpiece he painted around 1465–90. His Presentation in the Temple survives as one of several panels from the dismembered Liesborn Altarpiece, now distributed between the National Gallery London and German museums. The altarpiece was among the most ambitious Westphalian painting commissions of its century, and the Presentation panel shows the master's characteristic blend of Flemish spatial influence with a local figure type of rounded, gentle faces.

The Master of Liesborn renders Simeon in elaborate high-priestly vestments with an embroidered orphrey that is among the most technically accomplished passages of textile painting in fifteenth-century German art. The Temple interior's soft spatial recession uses Flemish convention without the rigorousness of a Cologne or Bruges master.