THE early art of Flanders, unlike that of Italy, does not present itself at the Louvre, or indeed at any Gallery, in orderly sequence from the immature groping for artistic expression to masterly achievement. With the exception of the exquisite work of the late-fourteenth-century miniaturists, which forms a special branch of study, there is nothing to bridge the immense gulf that divides Melchior Broederlam, the earliest known Flemish painter, from the brothers Van Eyck, whose earliest known work, the wonderful Ghent polyptych of The Adoration of the Lamb, is, if not quite the starting-point, the noblest achievement of the Early Flemish school. The invention of oil-painting, in the sense of the word as it is applied to-day, with which the Van Eycks are credited, no doubt contributed largely towards this amazingly sudden progress; but their art also marks a new era in the conception of life and pictorial form. An ardent love of truth and nature takes the place of the earlier vague idealism. At the same time, the realism of the brothers Van Eyck and their followers, notwithstanding its insistence on literal truth in the representation of frequently ugly details, was kept in check by deep sentiment, love of splendid colour, and a great sense of style in composition. Details, even in the far-away distance, were certainly elaborated with minute precision, but they are never unduly obtrusive, and are invariably subordinated to the main motive.

The earliest important Flemish painting in the Louvre is the famous Virgin and Child with the Chancellor Rolin (No. 1986, Plate XVI.) by Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441), which was taken by order of Napoleon I. from the Collegiate Church of Autun in Burgundy. In a three-aisled colonnaded hall with stilted arches and pavement of geometrical inlay is seen Nicholas Rolin, Chancellor of Burgundy and Brabant, kneeling at a prayer-desk before the Virgin, on whose right knee is seated the Infant Saviour holding an orb in His left and raising His right hand in benediction. An angel with peacock-blue wings is floating above the Virgin and holding an elaborately wrought golden crown over her head. The exquisite detail of the river landscape with a view of Maastricht extending beyond the open colonnade, the sumptuous brocaded dresses, the carved capitals of columns and piers, and many other details painted with inimitable minute skill, help towards an ensemble of jewel-like splendour dimmed but not marred by the yellow varnish which covers the surface. The Virgin with the Donor was formerly generally attributed to Hubert, but is most probably a late work by Jan van Eyck, painted perhaps about 1432.

THE SCHOOL OF TOURNAI

Neither Petrus Christus (1412?–1473), the only master who was directly influenced by Jan van Eyck, nor Robert Campin (1365–1444), who is now known to be identical with the so-called “MaÎtre de FlÉmalle,” and who was the head of the important Tournai school, are represented at the Louvre. The official Catalogue ascribes to Campin’s greatest pupil, Rogier van der Weyden (c. 1400–1464), the two panels The Virgin and Child (No. 2195), and The Deposition from the Cross (No. 2196), of which at least the former is only a school version of an often repeated theme by the master, whilst the Deposition is by no means an important example of his work. Rogier was born at Tournai, but went to Brussels after 1432, and practised in that city until his death in 1464. A journey to Italy in 1449 did not appreciably affect his art, which always retained an archaic flavour, especially in the rather tortured rendering of the nude. In this respect, and also in his utter disregard of beauty (except the beauty of rhythmic line), he compares unfavourably with the brothers Van Eyck, as may be clearly seen on comparing his work with Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Donor. His occasional use of gold backgrounds, as in the Virgin and Child (No. 2195), is another archaic trait.

The hand of a nameless contemporary and follower of Campin and Rogier van der Weyden, who is also represented at the Galleries of Vienna, Turin, and Antwerp, is to be recognised in the small panel of The Annunciation (No. 2202), which was formerly attributed to the much later painter Lucas van Leyden, and has also been claimed to be only a copy of a picture by the MaÎtre de FlÉmalle.

HANS MEMLINC

The influence of Rogier van der Weyden determined the entire course taken by the Flemish school until its decline with the introduction of those Italian Renaissance tendencies which only became a vital factor and led to the birth of a new Flemish art through the genius of Rubens. Again, Rogier’s chief pupil, Dierick Bouts (c. 1410–1475), is unrepresented at the Louvre. In the art of Hans Memlinc (c. 1430?–1494), who was the founder of the great school of Bruges, may be found clear traces of the influence of Rogier and of Bouts, although we have no certain knowledge as to that master’s actual pupilage. He may have been born at MÖmlingen, near Aschaffenburg on the Main, and apparently had already risen to fame as a painter before 1467, the date of his great altarpiece at Dantzig. By that time he was settled at Bruges. Mr. W. H. J. Weale’s researches have shown that the legend, according to which Memlinc first came to Bruges as a wounded soldier and was nursed back to health at the Hospital of St. John, is not founded on fact. It is probable that Memlinc served his apprenticeship under some Cologne painter, but all theories regarding his early life must remain largely conjectural.

What is of real importance is that he introduced into the detailed realism of his precursors a note of pious fervour and tender idealism, which is the nearest approach in Northern art to the angelic sweetness of Fra Giovanni da Fiesole. Not without good reason has he been called “the Fra Angelico of the North.” Fromentin was certainly right in saying that “Van Eyck saw with his eyes, Memlinc begins to see with his soul.” It is this warmth of feeling that makes Memlinc the most lovable painter of the Flemish school, for he could neither rival the dramatic power and realistic truth of the Van Eycks, nor the firm draughtsmanship of Van der Weyden, nor Bouts’s skill in landscape painting. Nor did he take full advantage of the possibilities of the oil technique, his method remaining that of the tempera painters, although he availed himself of the new medium.

The earliest work by Memlinc in the great French national collection is the charming little diptych, painted about 1475, and representing on one leaf The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (No. 2027), and on the other The Donor, John du Celier, presented by St. John (No. 2027a). In the first the Virgin is seen seated in a flowering meadow in front of a rose-covered trellis and supporting the Infant Christ, who bends forward to place the ring on the finger of St. Catherine on the left. Behind the saintly bride are St. Agnes and St. Cecilia; whilst the group on the right comprises St. Barbara, with St. Margaret and St. Lucy, all accompanied by their characteristic attributes. On the other leaf the Donor is seen kneeling, with hands joined in prayer, in front of St. John the Baptist, who is pointing to Our Lord. The landscape background shows, on the left, the Apocalyptic vision of St. John the Evangelist, and on the right, St. George fighting the Dragon. This leaf, after passing through the collection of Mr. Herz and Mr. Heath, was presented to the Louvre in 1895 by Mme. AndrÉ, and was thus reunited with its companion, which had been bequeathed to the Gallery fourteen years earlier by M. E. Gatteaux. It is on the whole in an excellent state of preservation, although some of the accessories in the background are so thinly painted that they have almost disappeared.

MEMLINC’S “VIRGIN AND CHILD, WITH DONORS”

About 1490 Memlinc must have painted the admirable Virgin and Child, with Donors (No. 2026), which was commissioned by James Floreins, a member of the Bruges Merchant Grocers’ Guild, but subsequently found its way to Spain, whence it was taken to France by General d’Armagnac. The Donor, who is kneeling on the left, in front of his seven sons, is presented by St. James the Great, the same office being performed by St. Dominic for Floreins’s wife and her twelve daughters, on the opposite side. The scene is laid in a Romanesque church, with openings at either side, through which glimpses of the landscape beyond are obtained. The characterisation of all the faces, which bear a strong family likeness, is as admirable as the painting of the noble architecture. Remarkable, too, is the effect of perfect symmetry obtained in the arrangement of the two unequal groups through the simple device of placing the Virgin and Child more towards the less crowded side, although the canopy is in the exact middle of the panel. This altarpiece is certainly one of the most important works by Memlinc that are to be found outside Belgium.

The two little panels, St. John the Baptist (No. 2024), and St. Mary Magdalene (No. 2025), both standing in a landscape with small scenes from their respective legends, formed originally, with two further panels representing St. Christopher and St. Stephen, the shutters of a triptych. The centre part had disappeared before the wings, carefully sawn through the thickness of the panels so, as to separate the obverse from the reverse, came into the possession of Lucien Bonaparte, and afterwards of William II. of Holland. The two Saints now at the Louvre were purchased in 1851 for £469.

In 1908 the Louvre obtained, at the high price of £8000, the Portrait of an Old Lady (Plate XVII.), to which attention was first drawn at the Bruges Exhibition in 1902, when it was shown by M. Nardus, from whom it passed into the hands of M. Kleinberger. Both the Paris portrait, which is drawn with exquisite precision but has apparently suffered from over-cleaning, and its companion, the portrait of this anonymous lady’s husband at the Berlin Museum, were until 1884 in the Meazzu collection in Milan.

The triptych (No. 2028) with (a) The Resurrection, (b) The Ascension, and (c) The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, which was bought at Turin in 1860 for £540, and is officially considered to be of doubtful authenticity, is included by Mr. Weale in his catalogue of Memlinc’s works.

GERARD DAVID

The reconstruction and the rescuing from oblivion of the artistic personality of Gerard David, begun by Mr. Weale and completed by Freiherr von Bodenhausen, is one of the triumphs of the modern scientific method of criticism. The Louvre is fortunate in possessing two important examples from the brush of this master, who, born at Ouwater in Holland about 1460, was in his early studies influenced by Albert van Ouwater, but, after settling at Bruges in 1483, came under the spell of Van Eyck, Bouts, and above all of Memlinc, whom he succeeded as leader of the Bruges school. On his death in 1523, the supremacy of that school came to an end, and passed on to the city of Antwerp, which by that time had also superseded Bruges as a commercial centre. Gerard David was not Memlinc’s equal as regards intimate charm, but in his work is to be found a summing-up of all the achievement of the Flemish Quattrocento—“the last concentrated expression of the aims of all the great masters of that fertile age.”

After having been successively attributed to Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memlinc, and David’s pupil Ysenbrant, the Marriage at Cana (No. 1957, Plate XVIII.) is now generally admitted to be designed and partly executed by Gerard David, although the panel shows unmistakable evidence of being completed by another and less skilful hand. Mr. Weale has shown, on the strength of a certain document, that the picture may have been finished by Ysenbrant, but he has been unable to establish that the document quoted by him refers to this particular picture. There can be no doubt that David himself painted the figure of the Donor, kneeling on the left, a marvellous example of early portraiture, and the Donor’s son, the Christ, and the boy carrying the cake. Some of the other heads are almost wooden in their hardness. The head of the Dominican looking into the hall through an opening beyond which is to be seen the Place du Saint-Sang, at Bruges, is clearly an afterthought, and is introduced so clumsily that the wall and the page-boy with the cake-dish really leave no room for the friar’s body. There is a curious lack of spiritual cohesion in the picture—the majority of the figures look away from the Saviour as well as from the bride, although the significance of the moment is such as to demand a concentration of everybody’s attention on the Christ. The picture, of which there are several replicas, notably one at the Stockholm Museum by David’s pupil Ambrosius Benson, was until 1580 in the Chapel of the Saint-Sang at Bruges, and then in the collection of Louis xiv., from which it passed into the Louvre.

The triptych (No. 2202a) of the Virgin and Child, with Two Angels, in the centre, and Two Donors presented by St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, on the wings, is officially catalogued as an anonymous picture of the Flemish sixteenth-century school, but is unquestionably an early work of Gerard David. It is interesting to note that the male Donor is the same as the Donor in the Marriage at Cana, though younger in years, and that the delightful and strangely Italian putti on the capitals of the columns that flank the Virgin’s throne recur again, reversed, in David’s Judgment of Cambyses, at Bruges. The Adam and Eve on the outside of the shutters are inspired by the corresponding figures on the great Van Eyck altarpiece at Ghent. The Louvre triptych was bought at the Garriga sale in Madrid, in 1890, for £248.

HIERONYMUS BOSCH

Before passing on to the school founded at Antwerp by Quentin Matsys (c. 1466–1530), mention should be made of Hieronymus Bosch van Aeken (c. 1462–1516), who, a follower of Ouwater, has as much right to be counted among the masters of the Dutch as of the Flemish school. Of his life we know but little. His pictures reveal that realistic observation of everyday life which was to become the characteristic of the Dutch school; but, added to it, there is a tendency towards the grotesque which made him delight in subjects that gave him full scope for the invention of weird monsters, devils, and spectres, such as the demons in The Damned (No. 1900), which is attributed to Bosch in the official Catalogue, but is, like its companion, Heaven, at the Lille Museum, the work of the unknown painter of the famous Last Judgment at Dantzig, which has by various experts been given in turn to Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Memlinc. There is at the Louvre a drawing which corresponds to so remarkable a degree with the panel No. 1900, that it has long been held to be a study from the same hand. This drawing is, however, more probably an early study by the German master Martin SchÖngauer after the Louvre panel. The picture was formerly in the DuchÂtel collection, and was given to the Louvre by the Duc de la TremoÏlle.

THE ANTWERP SCHOOL

Quentin Matsys, the painter of The Banker and his Wife (No. 2029, Plate XIX.), of which numerous replicas and variants are known, some probably from the hand of his pupil Marinus van Roymerswaele, still owes his training to the primitives of his race, but heralds the new era which was to culminate in the art of Rubens, by passing from the earlier minute precision of detail to a certain breadth of style and boldness of brushwork, necessitated partly by the larger scale adopted for his figures. Neither The Saviour Blessing (No. 2030) nor The Virgin and Child (No. 2030a), both of which are catalogued under his name, can be accepted as authentic; but the interesting genre group of The Banker and his Wife is not only fully signed and dated

but is unmistakably the work of his brush, although the woman’s face and hands appear to have been badly repainted. It was bought in 1806 at the low price of £72. The best version of the same subject is the one in the Sigmaringen Gallery. By Quentin Matsys is also, probably, the PietÀ (No. 2203), which is catalogued officially as “Flemish xvith Century.” Quentin’s son Jan, who followed his father’s tradition and achieved considerable distinction, is the painter of the hideous David and Bathsheba (No. 2030b), which bears the inscription

Next in importance among the Antwerp masters is Jan Gossart (c. 1470–1533?), better known as Mabuse, from the name of his native town Maubeuge in the Hainault. In his early work he followed the tradition of the great masters of his own country, but a journey to Italy in 1508 made him change his manner, and led him to adopt, together with the amplitude of Italian design, a certain floridness which compares unfavourably with the honest realism of his precursors and which led to the rapid decadence of the Flemish school. In the magnificent portrait of Jean Carondelet, Perpetual Chancellor of Flanders (No. 1997, Plate XX.), although it was painted as late as 1517, he is still faithful to the great tradition of his country for honest, straightforward, shrewdly observed, and delicately wrought portraiture. An inscription on the top of the arched gilt frame reads:

and, below, “fait l’an 1517.” In a niche behind the panel are the letters “i c” entwined with strings, and the motto “matvra.” The portrait was, therefore, obviously painted just before Carondelet accompanied Charles v. to Spain in 1517.

This portrait panel, together with The Virgin and Child (No. 1998), which bears on the frame the inscription

and the signature “johannes melbodie pingebat,” formed a diptych which was bought in 1847 from a Valenciennes architect for the ridiculous price of £40! A later portrait of Carondelet by Mabuse, dated 1531, appeared in 1907 at Christie’s under the name of C. Amberger, and realised the price of £3885. Another portrait of Carondelet, by B. van Orley, is in the Munich Gallery, where it is officially ascribed to Quentin Matsys, who is probably the painter of yet another portrait of the Chancellor which was recently in the DuchÂtel collection in Paris. The Portrait of a Benedictine (No. 1999) bears the date 1526 and the signature

The decline of the Antwerp school through the introduction of Italian mannerisms is illustrated in Young Tobias restoring Sight to his Father (No. 2001), a fully signed late picture by Jan van Hemessen, who flourished in that city towards the middle of the sixteenth century, and in whose art the last traces of the great national tradition disappear.

BAREND VAN ORLEY

Of the school that flourished in Brussels before Italianism appeared in the person of Barend van Orley (c. 1495–1542), the only name that has come down to posterity is that of Rogier van der Weyden’s follower, Colin de Coter, thanks to the clear inscription

on the hem of the dress of the kneeling Magdalen in The Holy Women (No. 1952b), which, with The Trinity (No. 1952a) and another lost panel, probably originally formed a triptych. The signed wing was presented to the Gallery in 1903; whilst the Trinity centre-piece was bought two years later from the AbbÉ Toussaint at St. Omer for £120.

Like Mabuse, Barend van Orley, after showing in his early work clear traces of his descent from the Flemish primitives, drank deeply at the fountain of Italian art. He was profoundly impressed by Raphael, from whom he endeavoured, with a certain degree of success, to learn the noble flow of drapery and the harmonious disposition of the design. On the other hand, he sacrificed the lustrous richness of Early Flemish colour and became addicted to dull grey shadows and pinkish lights. His Holy Family (No. 2067a) does not rank with his finest works, The Last Judgment at Antwerp and the Holy Family at Liverpool. The architectural setting, with a statue of Neptune in a square in the background, indicates the advent of the Renaissance. The picture was bought at the Otlet sale in Brussels, in 1902, for £540. With Barend van Orley closes the chapter of the Early Flemish school. Indeed, he was rather the first of the new era than the last of the primitives.