Career
He was probably born in Oudewater, and is mentioned by Karel van Mander (1604) as a reputable painter at the time in which he lived. Van Mander highly commends an altarpiece by Van Ouwater in the principal church in Haarlem, the Grotekerk or Sint-Bavokerk, representing Saint Peter and Saint Paul, in which the figures are carefully and correctly designed, and richly coloured. According to Van Mander, landscape painting was a particular specialty of this Dutch school, although none of Van Ouwater"s surviving works exhibit this tendency.
Van Ouwater seems to have been a contemporary of Dirk Bouts in mid-15th-century Haarlem, and Geertgen tot Sint Jans may have been his pupil.
Van Mander describes another picture by Van Ouwater of a more extensive composition, the Resurrection of Lazarus, which had been taken by the Spaniards back to Spain after the siege of Haarlem as war booty, but which he saw the copy of that had been greatly admired by Maarten van Heemskerck. This has been identified as the painting now in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin.
This is the only widely accepted attribution to Van Ouwater, although many scholars also cr him with the small, fragmentary Head of a Donor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New New York Less convincingly, Albert Châtelet adds a pair of altar wings with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Michael (both in the Capilla Real, Granada) to Van Ouwater"s œuvre.
According to the RKD he was also known as Albertus Veteraquinas, and the art historian West.R. Valentiner identified him as identical to the painters Master of Bellaert and Master of the Tiburtine Sibyl.