Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hugo van der Goes was a Flemish painter active in Ghent in the late 15th century, regarded as one of the most significant and original Early Netherlandish painters of his era. He is known for innovations in monumental scale, a distinctive color range, and individualistic portraiture. His masterpiece, the Portinari Triptych, influenced the development of realism and color use in Italian Renaissance art after it arrived in Florence in 1483.
The Portinari Triptych is an altarpiece commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, manager of the Bruges branch of the Medici Bank, for the church of San Egidio in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. It is now held at the Uffizi in Florence. Giorgio Vasari praised it in his Vite of 1550, and it is the only work by van der Goes supported by clear documentary attribution.
Van der Goes entered the Rood Klooster near Auderghem as a lay brother in 1477, at what sources describe as the peak of his career. His reasons are not documented, but his fellow monk Gaspar Ofhuys later recorded that van der Goes was consumed by anxiety over how he would ever complete all the works he had to paint, with one account stating nine years would scarcely suffice.
In 1482, on the return leg of a trip to Cologne, van der Goes suffered an acute depression, declared himself damned, and attempted suicide. His companions returned him to the Rood Klooster, where he died shortly after a brief recovery. A report from 1495 by the German physician Hieronymus Munzer suggests a painter from Ghent was driven to melancholy by trying to equal the Ghent Altarpiece, a detail that may refer to van der Goes.
In 1873 Vincent van Gogh mentioned Emile Wauters' 1872 painting Portrait of Hugo van der Goes in a letter to his brother Theo van Gogh. On two further occasions van Gogh compared his own appearance to the 15th-century painter as Wauters had depicted him and stated he identified emotionally with van der Goes.
The Trinity Altarpiece, painted between 1473 and 1478, was commissioned for the Church of the Holy Trinity in Edinburgh by its first provost, Edward Bonkil. It now hangs in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. The surviving panels depict James III, King of Scots, with St. Andrew and the future James IV, alongside Margaret of Denmark and the donor Bonkil himself.