CLAUS DE WERVE - b. ~1380 Haarlem, d. 1439 Dijon

Claus (Claux) de Werve, Netherlandish sculptor, active in France. He was the nephew and follower of Claus Sluter. From his arrival in Dijon in December 1396 he was principal assistant to his uncle on the monumental Calvary group, the Moses Well, commissioned by Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, for the cloister of the Charterhouse in Champmol near Dijon. After Sluter’s death in 1406, de Werve was named ‘tailleur d’ymages et varlet de chambre’ to Duke John the Fearless, a position renewed under Philip the Good. Between 1406 and 1410 he completed the marble and alabaster tomb of Philip the Bold (Musée Archéologique, Dijon) begun by Jean de Marville and Sluter. De Werve travelled to Savoy in 1408 at the request of Duke Amadeus VIII, possibly to work on the Sainte-Chapelle at Chambéry.

He was in Paris in 1411-12 and was sent to Grenoble in 1436 in an (unsuccessful) attempt to find alabaster for the tombs of John the Fearless and Philip the Good. Among the few commissions documented from these later years is a stone votive group with a central Trinity for the Maison du Miroir, Dijon (1414; destroyed).

Tomb of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy

The tomb of Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy poses the difficult problem of Sluter’s workshop. The tomb was commissioned as early as 1377 from Jean de Marville, the Master Mason of the Carthusian monastery. After Marville’s death in 1389 Sluter took over the workshop, but abandoned the tomb for more pressing works. When the Duke died in 1404, work on the tomb was begun again; it was still unfinished when Sluter died. Some historians have tried to minimize the part played by Sluter, attributing the overall scheme to Marville and the sculptures of the mourners on the base to Claus de Werve, Sluter’s nephew; however, it is almost certain that Sluter designed the models for these last.