This catalogue of the early Netherlandish paintings in the National Gallery of Art inaugurates a projected series of more than two dozen volumes fully cataloguing the Gallery's holdings of paintings, sculpture, photographs, and decorative arts. This volume contains entries for paintings in the National Gallery that were produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by artists from the Netherlands. The entries are arranged alphabetically by artist; a short biography and bibliography for each artist is followed by individual entries on the paintings, each in order of acquisition. The authors address traditional questions of attribution and iconography; in addition, they examine the social, economic, and religious context in which the individual work of the art functioned. The volume is also probably the first museum catalogue to include the results of analysis by infrared reflectography and dendrochronological examination.