Jan Mostaert

Jan Mostaert (c. 1475 – 1552/1553) was a Dutch Renaissance painter who is known mainly for his religious subjects and portraits. One of his most famous creations was the Landscape with an Episode from the Conquest of America. There are very few details about the life of Jan Mostaert that are known with any certainty.

The traditional account of his life was based on the biography written by the 16th century Flemish artist and art historian Karel van Mander and included in his Schilder-boeck, published in Haarlem in 1604. Modern scholarship questions many of the assertions about the life of Mostaert made by Karel van Mander.

One of these is van Mander's assertion that he was appointed 'painctre aux honneurs' ("painter with honors") by Margaret of Austria, the governor of the Habsburg Netherlands; it does not seem that he became Margaret's court painter, although there are two mentions of him in her accounting records. Recent art historians think he probably worked in the provincial town of Haarlem, some way from the larger cities of the southern Netherlands, for all or most of his career.