The German painter Stephan Lochner (ca. 1410-1451) was the greatest artist of the school of Cologne in the Rhineland. His paintings express the serene beauty of an otherworldly orientation.

Stephan Lochner was a native of Meersburg near Lake Constance. In 1442 he settled in Cologne, the center of mystical religious thought in Europe as the Middle Ages drew to a close. A document of that year states that he married and bought a house. Elected twice as councilor of the painters' guild, he died during an outbreak of the plague.

The earliest of Lochner's few pictures, all in tempera on wood, seem to date in the 1430s. Among these is St. Jerome in His Cell, which is still very Gothic in form and spirit, in contrast to the new realism being pioneered at the time in Flanders. This miniaturelike painting reveals his propensity for softly modeled forms placed in...