Matthew Paris is the one English, indeed European, artist of the thirteenth century whose life, work, character and thought-processes are remotely open to scrutiny. He is also one of the few men of his age for whom we may even feel actual affection. Matthew was entertaining, industrious, pugnacious, blessed with remarkable powers of assimilation, cautious about the traps of the world, yet one of the liveliest observers of the ‘modern’. Literary men with connexions to the visual arts of any description in the English Middle Ages were extremely rare: Chaucer served briefly as a Clerk of the King’s Works . Matthew was neither a literary nor an artistic genius, yet the prodigious and well-preserved character of his work remains in a class of its own, and in retrospect he can be said to have belonged to an insular tradition of putting words into pictures . His first obligations were to his monastic profession and the Opus Dei; Matthew was secondly a compiler or author, and only thirdly an artist, though not in any professional sense. While others recognised his possession of special skills, there is no evidence that he worked for those with whom he had any prior connection, in return for remuneration. Matthew had a life outside the cloister: he was in Henry III’s presence at Westminster in 1247 and clearly had court contacts, and in Norway in 1248-9. In this he was like contemporary cloister monk-artists such as William the monk of Westminster, one of the king’s beloved painters at several of his residences . But there can be no doubt that Matthew was based firmly at St Albans and benefitted from its wealth and substantial literary and artistic holdings . Matthew appears usually to have worked alone or with limited assistance, and he established no artistic tradition at his monastery which outlived him.