André Abellon

André Abellon was a French Dominican friar, priest, preacher, and painter of the later Middle Ages, born in 1375 at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence. The town was already a major pilgrimage centre associated with the cult of Saint Mary Magdalene and housed an important convent of the Order of Preachers, which he entered as a young man. Almost nothing is recorded of his family. After profession and ordination he took up the Dominican apostolate of preaching, which in the fifteenth century remained a principal work of the order in the towns and countryside of southern France.

He spent much of his religious life in the Dominican houses of Provence, above all the convent at Aix-en-Provence, of which he became prior. The decades after the Western Schism were a time of recovery and of internal reform among the mendicant orders. Later Dominican tradition presents Abellon as a zealous preacher who sought to strengthen Catholic life in the region and as a superior charged with the observance and administration of his community.

Besides preaching and conventual office he worked as a painter and belongs to the small group of documented clerical artists of late medieval Provence. Religious panels in a Gothic manner have been attributed to him, including works connected with Dominican churches of the region, though modern art historians treat some of those attributions with caution. The combination of pulpit and workshop was unusual but not unknown in the Order of Preachers, which had long used images in teaching and devotion.

Abellon died on 15 May 1450 at Aix-en-Provence and was buried in the Dominican church there. A local cult formed around his tomb. In 1902 Pope Leo XIII confirmed that cult, an act that in the procedure of the time constituted beatification. He has not been canonized. His memorial is kept on 15 May, especially in Dominican calendars. Outside specialist literature on the Dominicans and on Provençal painting of the fifteenth century he remains a relatively little-known blessed.