Philip the Bold (duke of Burgundy) inaugurates the Champmol Charterhouse near Dijon, envisioned as a dynastic burial site and a major artistic program that would help define Burgundian court taste within the International Gothic milieu.
Excavations and the ceremonial laying of the first stone mark the true start of large-scale construction, establishing Champmol as the central Burgundian ducal monastery and a key setting for court-sponsored International Gothic art.
Jean de Marville is tasked with creating the tomb for Philip the Bold at Champmol—an ambitious sculptural project that would later be transformed and completed by Claus Sluter’s workshop, shaping Northern European court sculpture.
Claus Sluter attains the role of court sculptor at the Burgundian court, positioning him to lead Champmol’s most influential sculptural commissions and helping drive a shift toward powerful naturalism within an International Gothic framework.
Melchior Broederlam produces the celebrated painted wings for an altarpiece made for Champmol (including Annunciation and Visitation), a landmark of courtly International Gothic painting in Burgundy with strong Northern European resonance.
The Wilton Diptych—a rare surviving English panel painting—embodies International Gothic court aesthetics (refined elegance, jeweled surfaces, gold ground) and demonstrates the style’s cross-channel prestige among northern courts.
Sluter and his workshop begin carving the Well of Moses for Champmol (1395–1403), integrating International Gothic courtly refinement with an unprecedented monumental realism that became a touchstone for Northern European sculpture.
Jean Malouel arrives in Dijon and succeeds Jean de Beaumetz as court painter to Philip the Bold, strengthening the Burgundian court workshop system that linked panel painting, polychromy, and manuscript illumination.
The Well of Moses is finished for Champmol, consolidating Sluter’s reputation and influencing sculptural language across Burgundy and the Low Countries through its expressive prophets and material presence.
Philip the Bold’s death marks a transition in Burgundian patronage. John the Fearless assumes the duchy, maintaining Champmol commissions and the court’s role as a major hub for International Gothic production in northern Europe.
After Sluter’s death, Claus de Werve completes key elements of Philip the Bold’s tomb (set in place in 1410, with Malouel involved in polychromy and gilding), culminating a flagship Burgundian dynastic monument for Champmol.
The Limbourg brothers start illuminating the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (1412–1416), a defining International Gothic manuscript whose calendar scenes and refined courtly-natural observation became foundational for Northern European visual culture.
Jean, Duke of Berry, and all three Limbourg brothers die in 1416, leaving the Très Riches Heures unfinished—an interruption that underscores both the fragility of workshop production and the manuscript’s later, multi-phase completion history.
Jan van Eyck is recorded in October 1422 as painter and varlet de chambre to John of Bavaria, signaling a generational shift in the Low Countries toward Early Netherlandish approaches that grew out of (and moved beyond) International Gothic court traditions.
International Gothic in Burgundy and Northern Europe (c.1380–1425)
