the sculptured capitals of the columns are gilded, and wherever there is gold there are precious stones. Diamonds and carbuncles and pearls glisten in St. George’s breastplate and in St. Donatian’s crosier and in the orphreys of his cope, his gleaming mitre is all sewn with amethysts and pearls; there are pearls, too, round Our Lady’s mantle and on her breast and in her yellow hair, and all this splendour is so delicately manipulated and so minutely and carefully portrayed that it bears looking at through a magnifying glass, and it is arranged with such exquisite taste, and the figures which it adorns are so calm, and about the whole scene there is an atmosphere of such profound peace, that the picture is in no way tawdry or garish or vulgar.

This is the largest panel which John van Eyck is known to have painted; the figures are about half life size. It was placed originally over the high altar in St. Donatian’s, and we know from an inscription on the frame that it was completed in 1436.

At that time Bruges was straining every nerve to free herself from the tyranny of Philippe l’Asseuré. John, indeed, was on the winning side, but the battle had not yet been fought out to the bitter end, and in 1436 it was as likely as not that his patron would be worsted, and yet he went on quietly painting, and the calm saints of the St. Donatian’s picture bear no trace of the storm amid which they were created.

Gerard David

Half a century later, when Bruges was once more in the throes of rebellion, and the burghers, for the moment triumphant, had the weakling who would have enslaved them under lock and key and were exacting the uttermost farthing from the instigators and instruments of his crimes, a painter less famous than John van Eyck, but for all that well skilled in his art, and one whose hand, in spite of the turmoil around him, had not lost its cunning, was at work on two panels which now hang in the gallery at Bruges hard by Van Eyck’s picture. Similar in colour, hardly less delicate in design, adorned like it with jewels and gold, these pictures form the very antithesis to the calm altar-piece of St. Donatian’s. It is instinct with serene splendour, they are quick with gruesome motion; it is the portrayal of God’s mercy, they depict man’s vengeance. Van Eyck was inspired by the spirit of love, David by the frenzy of delirium.

It was but a passing phase. As in the days of the French Terror men who before had been peaceful citizens, carried away by the fury around them, committed all kinds of excesses, and when the blizzard had passed stepped quietly back into the old humdrum groove of former days as if nothing had happened, so David, under similar circumstances, defiled his brush by painting one loathsome picture, and presently, when the storm had spent itself, clothed and in his right mind, again resumed his old themes and his old methods: busied himself in adorning altars with fair virgins and sweet-faced angels, and by making breviaries beautiful with the legends of the saints.

From the little that is recorded of him he seems to have been a devout and charitable man, and the placid scenes he delighted to paint indicate that he was naturally of a humane and gentle disposition.

We know that in 1508 he joined the brotherhood of Our Lady of the Dry Tree, a famous religious guild affiliated to the Franciscan order. The following year he presented to the Carmelite nuns of Bruges one of his most exquisite pictures, an altar-piece representing Our Lady surrounded by virgin saints, at present in the gallery at Rouen; and later on, when the same nuns were in straitened circumstances, he advanced them a very considerable sum free of interest, only stipulating that the money should be returned when he asked for it. This he did during his last illness, several years afterwards, and it is pleasing to find that the nuns at once complied with his request. But to return to the days of his aberration. Shortly after the execution of Peter Lanchals and other members of the magistracy of Bruges, who like him had been accused of corruption and of conspiring with Maximilian to deprive the town of its liberty, the new magistrates whom the people had chosen to fill their place commissioned Gerard David to paint for the Court of Justice in the Hôtel de Ville two pictures which should remind the judges that if they should at any time fail in their duty punishment would assuredly follow.

Gerard was a native of Oudewater in Holland, who some four years previously had taken up his abode in Bruges. On the 14th of January 1484 he was enrolled among the members of the Guild of St. Luke. He was probably an ardent patriot, at all events was in touch with the popular leaders, for we know from documentary evidence that they employed him to paint the iron gratings which were placed before the windows of Jean de Gros’s mansion when Maximilian was imprisoned there, and, as we have seen, it was he whom they commissioned to paint the panels for the Town Hall.

The theme selected for his pictures is a horrible one—the conviction and the flaying alive of Sisamnes, an Egyptian judge who had been accused of receiving bribes. The story is first told by Herodotus, but David had probably culled it from the pages of Valerius Maximus, and there can be no doubt that the subject was suggested to him by the tragedy which had just taken place beneath the shadow of the Belfry. He has represented himself in the first panel calmly surveying the arrest of Sisamnes, and it may well be that he actually witnessed the execution of Lanchals, perhaps expressly with a view to these paintings. In each case the scene is laid at Bruges, the figures, the faces, the attitudes, the costumes, are all essentially Flemish, and it is in the highest degree probable that he introduced other portraits besides his own.

Mark the expression of Sisamnes in the flaying scene. See how his features twitch, how he clenches his hands and his teeth, and draws back his lips in agony. Did Peter Lanchals look like that when he was being racked in the infernal machine which he himself had invented?

There are only seven other pictures which can at present be certainly attributed to Gerard David. They are all of a sacred character, and four of them were painted for churches in Bruges. Of these the most beautiful is the triptych presented to the Carmelite nuns in 1509, and which adorned the high altar of their chapel until the community was suppressed by Joseph II. in 1783. Two years later, when their property was sold at Brussels, David’s picture was purchased by a dealer named Berthels for fifty-one florins. He sold it to a French collector, Monsieur Miliotti, in whose possession it remained until his estate was confiscated by the Revolutionary government some years later. Presently it was hung in the Municipal Gallery at Rouen, where it still remains. This is the most decorative, and perhaps the most charming of David’s pictures. The subject is Our Lady surrounded by angels and virgin saints. The grouping is sufficiently symmetrical and altogether excellent, the scheme of colour is rich and harmonious, and though the sacred figures almost entirely cover the panel, owing to the lack of detail in the background, a mass of deep, sombre green, almost black, they appear in no way crowded. The faces are for the most part somewhat heavy, and decidedly Flemish, but there is an air of calm repose about them which is very restful, and the fair-haired, white-robed angels which stand on each side of Our Lady’s throne are of another type. David must have drawn them from peasant models. This picture is all the more interesting from the fact that the artist has introduced his own portrait, and also that of his wife Cornelia,[47] the daughter of a Bruges goldsmith, one Jacob Cnoop, a native of Middelburg in Holland. Unless David flattered his wife, she must have been a woman of singularly prepossessing appearance, with bright eyes and an intelligent face. She stands with her hands clasped in prayer, the last figure but one on the left-hand side of Our Lady, beyond her stands St. Lucy, a child saint who suffered martyrdom at fourteen. She is here represented as a woman of forty, gorgeously arrayed in two shades of crimson, fat and not fair. David himself balances his wife on the opposite side of the picture. A sufficiently artistic face this, but upon the whole not a pleasing one. His eyes are too prominent, his lips are too thick, and he has a weak, receding chin.

Gerard David painted two pictures for the Church of St. Donatian:—an altar-piece representing the mystic marriage of St. Catherine, and two panels which formed the shutters of a triptych. These, together with the wings of several other triptychs, were sold by the Cathedral Chapter in 1787 at the request of the sacristan, a lazy, clumsy fellow who, objecting to the trouble of opening and closing them, averred that he invariably broke the altar candles in doing so. One of David’s shutters has disappeared, the other, after passing through several hands, was purchased in 1859, for five hundred and twenty-five guineas, by Mr. Benoni White, who, at his death in 1878, bequeathed it to the National Gallery.

Here we have a portrait of the donor Bernardin Salviati, Canon of St. Donatian’s and the son of a wealthy Florentine merchant who had married a Flemish lady and settled at Bruges. The kneeling canon is attired in a surplice of fine linen and is accompanied by three saints—St. Donatian resplendent in black brocade glistering with jewels and gold, St. Martin in a crimson velvet cope, with richly-embroidered orphreys, and his patron, the Franciscan saint, Bernardin, in the rough grey frock of the poor man of Assisi. The heads are very fine, full of expression and more Italian than Flemish in type, but the figures are not gracefully posed; there is too much landscape, and the picture is hardly decorative enough for an altar-piece.

The St. Donatian’s ‘Marriage of St. Catherine’ is also at present in the National Gallery. It seems to have been taken to Paris when the old cathedral was destroyed. It eventually became the property of M. de Beurnoville; when his collection was sold in 1881, the late Mrs Lyne Stephens purchased it for 54,100 frs. (£2164), and it was bequeathed by her to the nation.

This panel is far superior to the Salviati picture. The colouring is very rich and mellow, the composition is perfect, the faces are admirably painted and, though somewhat heavy and Flemish in character, are on the whole pleasing; the background, with its vine-clad walls and lovely garden of roses, and lilies, and trees beyond, and picturesque buildings, is altogether beautiful and in no way obtrusive. The whole picture is admirably adapted to the purpose for which it was designed.

The only one of David’s sacred pictures which remains in Bruges is the triptych known as ‘The Baptism of Christ.’

The history of this picture is a strange one. It was painted early in the fifteen hundreds for John des Trompes, who at that time was city treasurer, probably for his private oratory; later on, in 1520, it was presented by his heirs to the Guild of Advocates, and placed over the altar of their chantry in the crypt of St. Basil in the Bourg. A coat of black distemper inscribed with the Ten Commandments saved it from the fury of the Calvinists in 1579. Carried off by the French in 1794, it remained in Paris until 1815, when it was at last sent back to Bruges and placed in the City Gallery, where it still remains. It hangs alongside of David’s other pictures, is in striking contrast to them, and as a work of art their inferior. The grouping is not happy. Two of the three principal figures in the central panel are decidedly weak, and those in the distance are for the most part stumpy and graceless. On the other hand, the figure of the kneeling angel who holds our Lord’s garments is singularly beautiful. His sweet, placid face might have been drawn by Memlinc and his glorious vesture by John van Eyck. The landscape setting is the most interesting portion of this panel, and in all probability it is not David’s work. Mr. Weale thinks that Joachim Patenier may have painted it, and Jules Helbig is of the same opinion. ‘Nothing,’ says Mr. Weale, ‘can well be finer than this portion of the picture; the trees, vigorously painted and finished with wonderful minuteness, have evidently been studied individually from nature.... Between their trunks we get glimpses of real distant landscape. The herbage, lilies, mallows, violets, and other flowers in the immediate front have never been more admirably reproduced by the art of the painter.... The transparency of the water, the reflection of surrounding objects and the shadows on its surface are faithfully rendered. The bedding of the rocks too is imitated with perfect truth. The colouring of all this portion is so remarkably bright and lovely that the faults of the composition are not at first noticed.’

All this is no exaggeration. Bearing in mind the age in which it was produced, this piece of landscape painting is in truth a marvellous achievement. Considered in itself it is worthy of the highest admiration. But instead of being a mere accessory, as was the case in the pictures of the Van Eycks, of Memlinc, of Van der Weyden, of all the earlier masters, the landscape here forms, so to speak, the dominant note of the picture. The beauty of these fair fields and woods and mountains is the first thing which attracts the spectator’s attention. The sacred figures are overwhelmed and belittled and cast into the shade by the splendour of their setting, and, after all, the sacred figures should form the principal feature of a picture like this, intended for an altar-piece. On the whole we cannot help regretting that Gerard David called in the aid of Joachim Patenier. The left wing shows the donor and his little son Philip, and his patron, St. John the Evangelist; the right, the donor’s first wife, her four daughters and her patroness, St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Each of these panels has a landscape background, no less beautiful and no less obtrusive than the landscape in the central panel. The triptych when

GERARD DAVID’S ‘BAPTISM OF CHRIST’ Municipal Gallery, Bruges

shut displays five figures—Our Lady seated beneath a canopy, with the Divine Infant on her knee, and facing them the donor’s second wife, her little daughter and her patroness, St. Mary Magdalene. Here there is an architectural background of open arcades, with a view beyond, perhaps of Bruges.

This is perhaps the least satisfactory of the nine pictures which, to quote the words of Mr. Weale, ‘can at present with certainty be assigned to Gerard David.’

In the Museum of the Holy Blood there is a triptych representing the Deposition, which, according to documents preserved in the confraternity archives, was painted by David in 1520. The authenticity of this picture is, however, contested, and it is certainly far inferior to any of his known paintings.

Gerard David married probably during the year 1496. His wife, as we have seen, was Cornelia Cnoop. They had issue one daughter, who was christened Barbara, and was already married at the time of her father’s death. During forty years he held a foremost place among the painters of Bruges. He was elected a councillor of the Guild of St. Luke in 1488, and again in 1495 and in 1498. He was gathered to his fathers on the 13th of August 1523. They buried him in Notre Dame, beneath the tower, but no stone marks the place of his sepulture. When the church was repaired at the beginning of the last century it disappeared. Many of the old Notre Dame tombstones have been put to ignoble purposes, serve as doorsteps for houses in the neighbourhood, or to pave kitchens, or are stowed away in cellars and back-yards. Perhaps David’s monument is among the number. It was engraved with his arms, which are known, and those of his wife, and the memorial inscription has been preserved. Hence in all probability it would be easy of identification.

Great painter as he undoubtedly was, the fame of Gerard David hardly survived him, even in the city in which he had so long dwelt.

Van Mander, writing as early as 1604, was obliged to avow that he had no information concerning him, save only this, that Peter Pourbus, who died in 1584, considered him to be an excellent artist, and Van Mander had long inhabited Bruges.

By the close of the sixteen hundreds even those of his pictures which still adorned the city of his adoption were attributed to other painters, and for more than two hundred and fifty years his name was buried in oblivion.

Less than half a century ago Mr. Weale brought it back to men’s memory. To his diligent research the world is indebted for all that is now known of the life and labours of this great artist. From his writings in the Beffroi de Bruges, the Gazette des Beaux Arts, and elsewhere, we have culled the notes here set down on the history of Gerard David and the histories of the pictures he painted.

To return for a moment to John van Eyck. There are two other pictures at Bruges which are possibly his. The first is a small panel in the municipal gallery representing the head of Christ. Mr. Weale refuses to acknowledge this as an authentic picture, and says that the only part which is well painted is the embroidered collar of the tunic. Lübke, on the other hand, speaks of it as a genuine Van Eyck, and ascribes the date to 1440, the year of John’s death, but he adds, ‘like the head of Christ in the Berlin Museum, painted two years previously, it exhibits a certain want of expression, seeming to intimate to us the limits of John’s genius.’

M. de Copman, the curator of the Bruges Gallery, has no doubt that it is authentic, and describes it as such on the frame. One thing is certain. If this picture was indeed painted by John van Eyck it is not worthy of him.

The second picture, a finely-painted Mater Dolorosa, is in the Cathedral. From the fact that it is signed with the initials J. E. it was formerly attributed to John, but it is now generally acknowledged to be the work of some other artist.

Among the crowd of artists who in the course of the fourteen hundreds flocked to Bruges, and whose method of painting was inspired either directly or indirectly by the brothers Van Eyck, note Pieter Christus, a native of Baarle near Tilburg, who died at Bruges in 1473, the only pupil of John van Eyck whose name has come down to us; Gerhard van der Meire, Dierick Boudts, Roger van der Weyden, all of them perhaps pupils of Hubert’s; Roger’s pupil, Hans Memlinc, the greatest of all the Bruges painters after the brothers Van Eyck, and, towards the close of the century, Quentin Metsys, Albert Cornelis and Jerome Bosch.

Strangely enough, of these men only one, Albert Cornelis, was a native of Bruges, and though they all of them spent a considerable portion of their lives there, the sum of their united labours is at present represented in the city by hardly a score of pictures. Of the work of Pieter Christus nothing remains; Quentin Metsys, Hugo van der Goes and Roger van der Weyden are likewise unrepresented, though several of the masterpieces of the last two were in the Church of St. Jacques at the close of the seventeen hundreds. When they disappeared, or what has become of them, is unknown. One picture remains in Bruges which was perhaps painted by Gerhard van der Meire, four which are probably the work of Dierick Boudts; Jerome Bosch and Albert Cornelis are each represented by one picture, Gerard David, as we have seen, by three or perhaps four, and Hans Memlinc by six which are certainly his work, and by some half-dozen others which are attributed to him with more or less probability, whilst scattered about the town there are many pictures, some of them very beautiful, which were no doubt painted at Bruges during the period we are now considering, but by artists who have not as yet been identified.

Of the lives and surroundings of these great masters little has come down to us. All that is certainly known concerning most of them is the place of their birth and death, and the date of those events—even these meagre details are in the case of some of them lacking—and that of the multitude of pictures of the Flemish school of this period scattered throughout the churches and galleries of Europe, not a few can be positively traced to one or other of the Bruges masters.

Roger van der Weyden.

Roger van der Weyden, the greatest of the immediate disciples of John van Eyck, was born at Tournai early in the fourteen hundreds. In 1436 he was appointed painter to the city of Brussels, and it was probably during this time that he adorned with gold and colour the statuary of the tomb of Jeanne of Brabant, which Philippe l’Asseuré erected in the Carmelite Church there. In 1450 he made a pilgrimage to Rome for the great jubilee which was celebrated during that year. We know something of the details of this journey. En route he sojourned at Ferrara, at Milan and at Florence, and in all of these towns he received the most cordial welcome, not only from his brother artists, but from the ruling princes. At Ferrara he must have worked for Lionel d’Este, for on his return to Brussels we find him receiving from that prince the sum of twenty golden ducats in part payment for certe depicture executed in his palace at Ferrara. At Milan he painted for Francesco Sforza a Calvary, with the portraits of Francesco himself, his wife, Blanche Visconti, and their young son, Galéas. This splendid picture is now in the Musée des Beaux Arts at Brussels. At Florence he was employed by Cosmo de’ Medici. The fruit of his labours in that city is at present in the Stadel Museum at Frankfort—a glorious triptych which represents the Madonna and Child, with St. Peter and St. John the Baptist, patrons of the city, on the right, and on the left the mighty Cosmo himself and one of his brothers, perhaps Lorenzo, in the guise of the patrons of the Medici family—Saints Cosmas and Damian. He does not seem to have practised his art in Rome. Perhaps his stay there was a short one, and that his time was fully occupied by sight-seeing and devotion. That he fully appreciated the art treasures of the Eternal City there can be no doubt, and we know that he was enraptured with the Lateran pictures of Gentile da Fabriano, whom he pronounced to be the first painter in Italy.

During the later part of his life Roger seems to have resided at Bruges, and here perhaps he painted the Middelburg triptych now in the Berlin Gallery, and the missing triptych which formerly adorned the Church of St. Jacques. This picture excited the admiration of Albert Dürer when he visited Bruges in 1521. Its theme was the life of St. John the Baptist. The same subject is portrayed in a painting attributed to Roger, at present in the Berlin Gallery. Have we here the Bruges picture?

The exact date of Roger’s death is known—June 18, 1464; we also know the name of his wife, Elizabeth Goffart, and that he was the father of four children, Corneille, Margaret, Peter and John, of whom Peter followed his father’s calling. He seems, like his master John van Eyck, to have been a man of many parts; we have already seen him colouring statues, he was also an illuminator of manuscripts. A miniature of exceptional beauty, attributed with reason to him, is in the possession of M. Gielen of Maeseyck (see Rev. de l’Art Chrétien, 1889, p. 380). A reproduction of it is published in the Annales de l’Académie d’archéologie de Belgique, vol. xxiv. Perhaps, too, he was a wood engraver. Waagen is of opinion (see Sotheby’s Principia Typographica) that the woodcuts of the Biblia Pauperum were designed by him.

Roger van der Weyden was, in his way, even more of a realist than John van Eyck, and he possessed all John’s love of elaborate detail; but whereas the latter was pleased with serene immobility Roger delighted in tragic action, and his tall, wan, emaciated figures are often convulsed with weeping. He could, however, depict tranquillity when he liked, and his portraits are as calm and collected as any of Van Eyck’s. His heads are invariably finely painted and full of expression, but they are almost always ascetic looking, and very often sad. Take for example the portrait of Bladelin in the Middelburg picture. He seems, indeed, to have been unable to appreciate the beauty of health and gladness, and to corpulence he had a rooted objection. If that fat, flabby-faced old canon, George van der Pale, had commissioned Roger to paint his portrait, he would somehow or other have managed, without losing the likeness, to make him look fragile and refined.

Of the Flemish painters of the fourteen hundreds M. Fiérens-Gevaert remarks: ‘La morbidesse que Bruges dissimule si richement, se prolonge dans leur art. Ils créent des figures minces, élancées, splendidement vêtues.’ The assertion is too sweeping, but it is certainly true in the case of Roger van der Weyden.

Dierick Boudts.

Of Roger’s contemporary Dierick Boudts we know little save that he was born at Harlem, towards the close of the thirteen hundreds, that he passed a portion of his life in Bruges, and that in 1462 he settled at Louvain, where he continued to reside until his death in 1475.

Two of his most famous works are still in the Church of St. Peter in that city—an altar panel representing the martyrdom of St. Erasmus, and the central panel of a polyptych, of which the subject is the Last Supper. This picture has been broken up, and the side shutters are now in the Berlin Gallery. There is a contemporary copy of the entire painting, perhaps a replica by Dierick himself, in the seminary at Bruges. The Church of St. Jacques in the same city contains another of his works, or rather a work attributed, probably correctly, to him, a retable in three compartments, wherein is depicted the legend of St. Lucy. The soft, mellow colouring of this picture is perfect, and all the details, the rich brocades and velvets, the embroidery and precious stones, the flowers and fruit in the foreground, are quite admirable, but the figures are stiff and ill-proportioned. In the background is a view of the city of Bruges with the Belfry as it appeared before the lantern was added, and the Church of Notre Dame. This picture is dated 1480.[48]

There is a triptych in Bruges Cathedral, in the first chapel on the northern side of the chevet, which is attributed to Memlinc. The painting on the left shutter is quite in his style and is in all probability his work. Here are shown portraits of the donors, Hippolytus de Berthoz and Elizabeth van Keverwick, his affianced bride. This panel has been much spoiled by restoration, and the removal of the glacis has chilled the tone of the colouring. The other panels are evidently the work of another painter, and there is little doubt that that painter was Dierick Boudts. The ill-proportioned figures, the finely-drawn heads, and the rich, mellow colouring are all his. The scene depicted on the central panel is the martyrdom of St. Hippolytus, who is being torn to pieces by four horses; in the further panel he confesses himself a Christian and is condemned to death.

There is a fourth picture in Bruges, which perhaps may have been painted by Dierick Boudts. It is in the Chapel of the Sœurs Noires in the Place Memlinc, and represents eight episodes in the legend of St. Ursula. It probably dates from an earlier period than the famous shrine of St. Ursula in the Hospital of St. John, and it is not unlikely that we have here the prototype of that marvellous production.

The picture attributed to Gerhard van der Meire hangs in the southern aisle of the Cathedral. Therein are depicted three Passion scenes—the Carrying of the Cross, the Crucifixion and the Deposition. The treatment is coarse and realistic in the extreme. The picture is not a pleasing one. Alike in colour, in sentiment, in design it is far inferior to any of Gerhard’s authentic works.

In the Municipal Gallery there is an ‘Adoration of the Magi’ (No. 28), which formerly belonged to the monks of the great Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady on the Dunes at Coxyde. Much spoiled by restoration, somewhat quaint and naïve in design, it is still a beautiful picture. There is no extrinsic evidence to show who painted it, but the style is the style of Jerome Bosch.

In the Church of St. Jacques, about half-way up the southern aisle, hangs the picture of Albert Cornelis—the central panel of a triptych on which is portrayed the Coronation of Our Lady in the presence of the nine choirs of angels. This is in every respect a most remarkable and a most interesting picture. Painted in 1520, at a time when the artists of Bruges had already begun to adopt the methods of the Renaissance, it is instinct with the spirit which animated the old illuminators of the beginning of the previous century. Of a delicate, miniature-like style, beautiful alike in sentiment, in design, in colour and in execution, it is the only known work of the master-hand that produced it.

Hans Memlinc.

Hans Memlinc, the greatest painter in Christendom, as a writer of his own day calls him, seems to have been born somewhere about the year 1430. He was in all probability a native of Mayence, or of some locality within the electorate. M. Wauters, in his Sept Études pour servir à l’histoire de Hans Memlinc, published at Brussels in 1893, inclines to Memlingen, a village about forty miles from the city. M. Jules Helbig suggests Aschaffenburg, near which place flows a stream called the Mumling.

Be this as it may, the Jesuit Father Henri Dursart’s discovery in 1889 of Romboudt de Doppere’s journal (1491 to 1498) at least puts an end to the dispute as to Memlinc’s nationality. There can no longer be any doubt that the great Bruges painter was, at all events, of German extraction, and the same document informs us that he died at Bruges on August 11, 1494, and that he was buried in the Church of St. Gilles—Die. XI. Augusti (1494), Brugis obiit Joannes Memmelinc, quem prædicabant peritissimum fuisse et excellentissimum pictorem totius tunc orbis Christiani oriundus erat Magunciaco, sepultus Brugis ad Ægidii.

A note at the beginning of his journal informs us that Doppere was a priest, a notary of Bruges and registrar to the Chapter of St. Donatian, and he himself tells us that in 1491 he had been attached to the Church of St. Donatian for over forty-six years—Ego Romboldus de Doppere, presbyter, versatus sum hic in ecclesia S. Donatiani ultra annos XLVI. ... We find him acting as notary from 1483 to 1491, and in that capacity he witnessed, on October 21, 1489, the translation of the relics of St. Ursula to Memlinc’s new shrine. Doppere was then personally acquainted with Memlinc, perhaps his friend. In the later years of his life he seems to have been a canon of Notre Dame. He died, according to Meyer, in 1501, and was buried in the church he had so long served.

As long ago as 1861 Mr. Weale proved by documentary evidence, published for the first time in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, that Memlinc had obtained the freedom of the city of Bruges in 1478, that two years later he was in the enjoyment of a considerable fortune, a portion of which was invested in house property, and that the dwelling which he himself inhabited was in the rue St. George on a site now occupied by the garden of the house No. 20, that his wife’s Christian name was Anne, that she bore him three children, John, Corneile and Nicolas, and that she died in 1487. This is all that is at present certainly known concerning the story of Hans Memlinc.

According to a legend long current in the city, Memlinc was a poor soldier who, having escaped with his life from the battlefield of Nancy (January 4, 1477), somehow or other succeeded in making his way to Bruges, sought shelter in the Hospital of St. John, and was there healed of his wounds. Having no money wherewith to requite the brethren for the kindness they had shown him, he painted them a picture, or rather a whole series of pictures—the famous Shrine of St. Ursula.

There is no documentary evidence in support of this story. The first writer to mention it is the Abbé Jean Baptiste Descamps in his Vie des peintres Flamands, which appeared in 1733, some two hundred and forty years after Memlinc’s death, and since Mr. Weale’s discoveries in 1861 it has been generally and perhaps too lightly regarded as devoid of all foundation.

The documents which have of late years been brought to light do not, however, touch the main outlines of the hospital story, though they certainly prove that some of the incidents could not have taken place as the Abbé Descamps relates them.

Perhaps, as Mr. Weale suggests, Memlinc learned the first elements of his art at Cologne. There is a tradition that he was at one time the pupil of Van der Weyden. May be he first conceived his love of that delicate, miniature-like style which he afterwards brought to such perfection from ‘Master Simon Marmion of Valenciennes, who,’ Louis de la Fontaine tells us, ‘had such skill in the noble science of painting that he surpassed not only all the other artists resident in the said town, but likewise those of all the neighbouring cities,’ that ‘prince of illuminators,’ whom Jean Lemain, the poet-secretary of Marguerite of Austria, in his Couronne Margaritique enumerates among the most famous painters of his day.

We know that a young Brussels painter, whose Christian name was Hans, was sojourning at Valenciennes from 1454 to 1458,[49] and this same Hans seems later on to have returned to Brussels and entered the service of Roger van der Weyden.

Of course Hans was a sufficiently ordinary name in Germany, but it was not a common one in the Netherlands, and there is another circumstance which makes it probable that the Hans in question was Hans Memlinc.

No picture of Marmion has come down to us which can be identified as certainly his, but there are several which may be his handiwork. Amongst them four panels on which is depicted the life of St. Bertin. They once formed the wings of the sculptured retable of silver gilt, adorned with enamel and precious stones, which for more than three hundred years glistered behind the high altar in the Abbey Church of St. Bertin at St. Omer, the last resting-place of so many of the early Counts of Flanders.

Exquisite alike in colour and design, in days when Gothic art was least esteemed these marvellous paintings excited universal admiration, and Rubens himself is said to have been so enamoured of their beauty that he offered to cover them with Louis d’or if only the monks would consent to sell.

Presently came the evil days of the French Revolution. The old church was pillaged and razed to the ground, and the triptych disappeared. Fortunately the shutters were saved. Somehow or other they came into the hands of a baker of St. Omer, who later on sold them to an art collector in the neighbourhood. In 1823 they were put up for sale at the Hôtel Bullion in Paris and purchased for 7500 francs (£300) by Monsieur Nieuwenhuys for William I., King of the Netherlands. Only the larger shutters, however, were placed in the King’s collection. The smaller ones were re-sold to M. Beaucousin, and when he died in 1861 they were purchased along with his other pictures for the National Gallery.

In days gone by these exquisite pictures were unhesitatingly attributed to Memlinc. There was an unbroken tradition at St. Bertin’s that he had painted them. ‘Never,’ says M. de Laplane in his Abbés de St. Bertin (1844), ‘had there existed a doubt at the abbey as to their authorship.’ The Abbé Descamps, who visited St. Omer in 1769, was quite sure that they were Memlinc’s, and for over a hundred years historians, artists and archæologists alike were unanimous in adjudging them his. Even as recently as 1881 the well-known Dutch art critic Victor de Stuers expressed the same opinion.

It was probably the Comte de Laborde who first expressed doubt as to their authorship. Writing in 1851 of the larger panels he says, ‘To whom must we attribute these two delicious pages—to Memlinc in a peculiar phase of his talent, painting in a different and in some respects a less precise style than he painted at Bruges? or have we here the work of a disciple or, may be, of a rival? If so the artist who produced them must be reckoned among the most eminent.... I shall have no peace until I have discovered the date, the price, and the author of these pictures.[50]

Crowe and Cavalcaselle are no less undecided:—if Memlinc painted the shutters in question, he must have been aided by his pupils. Others shared their uncertainty, others again unhesitatingly averred that the triptych could not be Memlinc’s.

The Comte de Laborde was never able, perhaps he had never time, to solve the riddle he had propounded, but of late years a no less capable and patient investigator has, at least in part, succeeded in doing so.

Mgr. Dehaisnes, like the author of Les Ducs de Bourgogne, was unable to affirm that the paintings on the St. Bertin’s triptych were the handiwork of Memlinc. If now and again an angel for example resembled his angels, there were other figures reminiscent of the style of Dierick Boudts or of Roger van der Weyden. The scheme of colour too recalled rather the rich, mellow, sunny tints of the ‘Adoration of the Lamb’ than the clearer tones of the shrine of St. Ursula, and in point of vigour and precision the unknown artist fell short of the great masters of the Bruges school and especially of the greatest of them all.

The long and careful investigation which Mgr. Dehaisnes undertook resulted in the identification of the donor of the precious triptych, viz., William Fillustre, Bishop of Toul, who ruled the Abbey of St. Bertin from 1450 to 1473; in the discovery of the price he paid for it, 1828 livres 26 sous, a sum equivalent in current coin to at least £1400, not including the value of the gold, silver and precious stones, all of which were furnished by the abbey treasury; and in the discovery of the approximate date of its completion, between 1455 and 1459, probably in the June of the latter year. And although Mgr. Dehaisnes has not been able to establish the identity of the author of the pictures, he has shown that it is in the highest degree probable than Simon Marmion painted them.

If what Mgr. Dehaisnes modestly calls his ‘conjectures vraisemblables’ should prove to be correct, and if Memlinc was indeed Marmion’s pupil, it may well be that he aided his master in painting the marvellous shutters, and in that case the St. Bertin’s tradition that he was their author may perhaps be thus accounted for.

The pictures which Memlinc executed at Bruges represent the work of his middle life and of his declining years. In former days they were sufficiently numerous, but now there are only six or at most seven of his authentic pictures within the limits of the city, and they are all of them save one, at present in the old chapter house of the Hospital of St. John. Of these the first in order of date is the great triptych which formerly adorned the high altar of the hospital chapel, and was painted in 1479. The subject of the central panel is the ‘Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine.’ Here Our Lady is seated in a cloister, on a rich throne backed with cloth of gold; above her head two hovering angels hold a crown. On her knee is the Divine Infant who, leaning forward, places a ring on St. Catherine’s finger. Behind His mystic bride stands an angel playing on an instrument of music, and beyond St. John the Baptist with his lamb beside him. On the other side of Our Lady a kneeling angel holds a book of which she appears to be turning one of the leaves; hard-by is St. Barbara reading, and in the background St. John the Divine. Beyond the cloister in the background is a fair landscape in which are depicted scenes from the life of the Baptist and from the life of the beloved disciple. The principal theme of the left-hand panel is the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist, that of the panel on the right the vision at Patmos of the other St. John.

Painted, most probably at the suggestion of John Floreins, who at that time was hospital treasurer, by an artist bearing the same Christian name, for a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist and St. John the Divine, at the cost of devout men and women who divided their time between labour and prayer, this triptych is in the first place the glorification of the precursor and the beloved disciple, and in the second of St. Catherine and St. Barbara, who typify respectively in mediæval art the contemplative and the active life.

In this picture we have the portrait of John Memlinc over and over again, for it was his wont, at least so it is said, to make himself his own model when he painted St. John the Baptist. Here too John Floreins appears twice. Once in the habit of his order—a small black-robed figure in the left-hand corner of the central panel, and again in the background of the same panel, between a marble column and Our Lady’s throne. This time he is represented in his secular capacity as public gauger of wine, near a huge crane in the rue Flamande, with the old Church of St. John, long since demolished, in the distance.

Such are the main outlines of the hospital triptych, the largest of Memlinc’s uncontested works, and the most beautiful in colour, at all events of his pictures in Bruges.

Its prototype is in England—perhaps it was painted there—and is at present in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. Executed for Sir John Donne, who

MEMLINC’S ‘ADORATION OF THE MAGI’ In St. John’s Hospital at Bruges

was slain at the Battle of Edgecote near Banbury on July 26, 1469, this picture must be among the earliest, perhaps indeed it is the most ancient of Memlinc’s uncontested works. Most of the figures herein portrayed are identical, or almost identical, with the figures in the Bruges triptych. Not only are they manifestly the same individuals, but their faces have the same expression and they are dressed in the same costumes. The colouring of this triptych is less rich than the colouring of the hospital picture, and perhaps the execution is less sure, but the grouping is more simple and more symmetrical, and there is an atmosphere of repose about it which one does not find to the same extent in the Bruges picture. The attention of the spectator is not distracted by a multiplicity of scenes in the background. Here there are no fluttering angels above Our Lady’s head, and the calm, dignified figure of the Evangelist on the left-hand shutter is decoratively far more effective than the ecstatic Evangelist in the corresponding wing of the Bruges triptych.

In the same year that Memlinc painted the ‘Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine,’ he painted also the picture which hangs opposite to it. This work is likewise a triptych, but of much smaller dimensions than the first. It probably adorned the private oratory of John Floreins, as an inscription in Flemish on the frame informs us that it was painted for him: Dit werk dede maken Broeder Jan Floreins alias vander Rüst Broeder Proffes vanden hospitale van Sint Jans in Brygghe anno 1479 opus Johanis Memlinc.

If there is any truth in the Abbé Descamps’s legend it was probably this picture, and not the shrine of St. Ursula, that Memlinc painted as a thank-offering to John Floreins, who, if he was not superior of the hospital when Memlinc is said to have been a patient there, certainly occupied a responsible position and was doubtless able to dispense favours. To the right of the central panel there is the figure of a man wearing a yellow cap, a form of headgear used until recently by convalescents in the hospital. Tradition says that we have here the portrait of Memlinc, and if Memlinc, indeed, portrayed his own features when he painted St. John the Baptist, tradition speaks the truth. These heads bear a striking resemblance to the head of the man in the nightcap.

The central panel represents the Adoration of the Magi, that on the right the Nativity, and the other panel the Presentation.

The triptych when closed shows two figures, St. John the Baptist—this, according to Jacques van Oost is the veritable portrait of the painter—and St. Veronica. On the frame are representations of the Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise painted in grisaille. These are also undoubtedly Memlinc’s handiwork. ‘Ici,’ notes Canon Duclos, ‘nous avons tout un poème: celui de la chute, de la rédemption et des manifestations du Rédempteur.’ The picture is certainly a glorious one, alike in design and in execution, and the scheme of colour is magnificent. It is esteemed by some to be Memlinc’s masterpiece, and it is without doubt the best of his Bruges pictures.

The third picture is a portrait of exquisite delicacy and finish, representing Marie, the second daughter of Willem Moreel, a master grocer of considerable wealth and standing in the city, and one of Memlinc’s chief patrons. An inscription on the frame, which in Mr. Weale’s opinion is certainly authentic, informs us that this picture was painted in 1480. The same year another Bruges tradesman, Master Tanner Peter Bultencke, commissioned Memlinc to paint a triptych for Notre Dame with scenes from the life of

ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST From Memlinc’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’ in St. John’s Hospital, Bruges
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST
From Memlinc’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’ in St. John’s Hospital, Bruges

ST. VERONICA From Memlinc’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’ in St. John’s Hospital, Bruges
ST. VERONICA
From Memlinc’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’ in St. John’s Hospital, Bruges

Christ. Alas! it has long since left the city and is now in the gallery at Munich.

The fourth picture is a beautiful diptych painted in 1487 for Martin van Nieuwenhove, and presented by him to the Hospice of St. Julian, a half-secular, half-religious house of entertainment for poor pilgrims, of which he was one of the two patrons appointed by the town. The left panel shows Our Lady with her Divine Infant, to whom she is offering a golden apple; the right has a portrait of the donor with his hands clasped in prayer, and an open breviary before him. This is one of Memlinc’s finest portraits.

The date of the paintings on the shrine of St. Ursula is not certainly known, but since the relic for which it was constructed was placed in the new shrine on October 24, 1489, it is probable that they were completed before that date.

In this dainty casket we have a striking example of the imperfections and excellencies of the age which produced it. It stands in the centre of the chapter house and is in the form of a Gothic chapel. Bristling with heavy and superfluous ornament, with even the flat surface of the roof painted so as to simulate relief, the pictorial representations which adorn it are exquisite alike in design, in colour and in execution. Each side is divided into three round-headed arcades of equal dimensions; within them Memlinc has painted the pictures which tell the story of St. Ursula as it was current in his day. These six panels contain the arrival of the saint and her companions at Cologne, their arrival at Basle and then at Rome, their homeward journey, in which they are accompanied by the Pope and his cardinals, their return to Cologne, and their martyrdom in the camp of the Huns. Of the six scenes the third is the most beautiful, both in colour and composition. At the gable ends of the shrine are two other pictures. One of them represents Our Lady with her Divine Son in her arms, and two of the hospital sisters kneeling at her feet; the other St. Ursula sheltering beneath her mantle ten of her companions. The high-pitched roof is adorned on each side with a large medallion set between two smaller ones; these contain angels playing on instruments of music, and Ursula receiving the crown of martyrdom, and the same saint surrounded by her companions in heaven. All these pictures are executed in a delicate, miniature-like style, and with great care and finish.

There is one other picture in the hospital museum attributed to Memlinc—a triptych of which the subject of the central panel is the Deposition. It is perhaps the rough design of a picture which was never carried out.

There is also a triptych by Memlinc in the Municipal Gallery. It once adorned the chantry of the Moreel family in the Church of St. Jacques, and was the gift of William Moreel, the father of Marie Moreel, whose portrait we have already seen in St. John’s Hospital. This picture was painted in 1484 in honour of St. Christopher.

In the central panel the gigantic form of the saint is seen wading through a river with the infant Jesus on his shoulders, and leaning on the trunk of a young tree which he uses as a staff. He cannot understand how it is that so small a burthen should weigh so heavily, and, wondering, turns his head to behold the child, who, with a smile on his face, lifts one hand to bless him, whilst with the other he steadies himself by grasping a white linen bandage which is wound round the saint’s head. On his right stands the Benedictine saint, Maurus, in his monk’s habit. One of Moreel’s daughters was a Benedictine nun, and it was doubtless on this account that Memlinc introduced his portrait. On the other side St. Gilles caressing the doe whose life he saved by receiving an arrow, which a huntsman had aimed at her, in his own arm. The figure of the saint is very fine, his face is the most beautiful in the whole composition. The reason why he is here introduced is not apparent. The left wing shows the donor with his five sons and his patron, St. William; the right, his wife, her patroness, St. Barbara, and their eleven daughters. The figures of St. George and St. John the Baptist are painted in grisaille on the outer side of the shutters. These last are probably not Memlinc’s work. Mr. Weale thinks that they may have been added in 1504 by order of John and George Moreel, two of the sons of the donor.

This picture is one of the most beautiful of Memlinc’s later works. Unfortunately it has suffered much from the ravages of time and restorers. The lower portion of the face of one of the donor’s sons has been clumsily repainted, and the removal of the glacis has chilled, and to a certain extent spoiled, the harmony of the scheme of colour.

We have said that Hans Memlinc was the greatest of all the Flemish masters of the fourteenth century save only the brothers Van Eyck. Mr. Weale places him on a higher pinnacle. In his estimation Hubert alone surpassed him. John van Eyck, he says, saw with his eyes, Memlinc beheld with his soul, and he adds—we are quoting from memory—that Memlinc was the most poetical and the most musical of all the Bruges painters. If this be so we can only say that John was more apt to portray what he saw than Hans what he imagined, that if Memlinc idealised the Flemish type he at the same time denaturalised it, that if his figures are more refined they are also less human.

That Memlinc was inspired by the true spirit of poetry no one can deny, but his imagination sometimes runs away with him and his verses are not wholly devoid of false quantities. In other words, by reason of the multitude of scenes which he not unfrequently introduces in single panels, his pictures sometimes lack the beauty and the dignity of simplicity; and though he at first composed in symmetrical groups, after the manner of his predecessors, in his later work he sacrifices too much to his love of the picturesque.

Hans Memlinc was a man of lofty ideals, and his creations are sometimes sublime, but not always.

John van Eyck was cast in a different mould. He was content to portray Nature as he saw her.

Give me beautiful models, we can imagine him saying, and I will paint you beautiful pictures. Give me ill-favoured models, and your pictures shall be beautiful still. Yet do I scorn to flatter; I will be true to life. If I must needs paint Flemings, my portraits shall be the portraits of Flemings. I will neither make a fat man thin nor a coarse woman refined. I will portray every blemish and every wrinkle, but I will place my figures to the best advantage. Their surroundings shall be magnificent; I will set them in the midst of fair courts and lovely temples; I will array them in the most becoming garments; I will bathe them in an aureole of glorious tones. Your eye shall be enchanted by the symmetry of my grouping and the graceful flow of my drapery; I will shower jewels with a lavish hand, and I will harmonize everything with my magic gold. Thus will I compel you to fall down and adore the splendour of the True.

CHAPTER XXV

Modern Bruges

Then, too, there were the troubles bred of the religious revolution and the tyranny of Spanish rule; the cruelty of Philip, and the cruelty of Alva, and the no less cruel retaliation of ‘the Beggars of the Sea,’ who on March 26, 1578, captured the city, and by the aid of Colonel Henry Balfour, a Scotch adventurer in the service of William of Orange, held it for six years.

During this period Catholic worship was strictly prohibited, many of the leading citizens were thrust into prison, amongst them the bishop, a large-minded and liberal man, who had done his utmost to stay Alva’s hand, and most of the clergy were driven into exile. Some of them fared worse still—were tortured, scourged, burnt at the stake in front of the Cathedral. Nor was this all. Sanctuaries were pillaged, altars cast down, art treasures innumerable were wantonly destroyed, the Church of St. Anne was razed to the ground, and Notre Dame was turned into a stable.

Two years later Balfour received his reward. It happened thus. About this time the Spaniards were threatening the city, and the Scotch colonel led out his troops to oppose them. Wounded in the conflict which followed, but apparently not grievously, for he was still able to keep his saddle, he turned his horse’s head towards Bruges. Presently his comrades saw him reel, and then, without a cry or any other sign, he fell back dead. They carried him home to the city, and buried him in the churchyard of St. Sauveur.

During these troublous times hundreds of the best and wealthiest families left the city, and when peace was at length restored in 1584, the population hardly numbered thirty thousand souls. If it had not been for the Church, Bruges would in all probability have gradually dwindled down to a mere village like Sluys or Damme, or even little Middelburg.

The action of Pope Pius IV., who, at the instance of Philip II. in 1560, had made Bruges an Episcopal See, saved her from this fate. Bitterly opposed as the measure had been by all classes of society—by the higher clergy, who feared that the presence of a bishop amongst them would lessen their prestige; by the monks, who knew that they would be shorn of revenue for the endowment of the new See; by the nobles, who regarded the great abbeys as the appanage of their younger sons; by the people, who believed that this step was the prelude to the installation of the Spanish Inquisition—it proved in the outcome the town’s salvation. And Bruges owed something more to the Church:—towards the close of the fifteen hundreds and during the opening years of the succeeding century, a vast immigration of wealthy families, who brought with them gold, and, better still, treasures of literature and treasures of art.

Many of the religious houses in the outlying country had been destroyed by the Ghent Calvinists, not a few in the immediate neighbourhood of Bruges by the burghers themselves, who, when the Gueux were threatening them in 1578, had caused all buildings within a mile of their walls to be razed to the ground, in order that the enemy might find no place for shelter. For fifty years after the settlement of 1582, even when the religious troubles were over, Flanders was the scene of continual warfare. Amid the coming and going of troops there was no guarantee of security outside the walls of the towns, and, as might be expected, the monks and nuns of the country-side flocked into the episcopal city. Amongst them were representatives of almost all the great religious orders—Benedictines, Carthusians, Dominicans, Augustinians, Carmelites, Capuchins, Jesuits, and, most noteworthy of all, Cistercians from the famous Abbey of St. Mary on the Dunes at Coxyde, and from the affiliated house called Ter Doest, at Lisseweghe.

Of all the religious communities to which Bruges now offered an asylum, this was the mightiest and the most renowned. It was unsurpassed alike in wealth, in learning, in numbers, in dignity of life, in dignity of tradition, in spiritual and temporal achievements. St. Bernard was its founder. Some of the holiest and wisest men of the Middle Ages had been numbered among its members; the abbey at Coxyde was magnificent; its church was, perhaps, the most beautiful in the land; thanks to the patient toil of its monks, as one of their abbots used to boast, the barren dunes which surrounded it had become a fertile garden.

BRUGES FROM THE RIVER YPERLET
BRUGES FROM THE RIVER YPERLET

A whirlwind of fanaticism swept them away, and now their vast domain is what it was before the white-robed brethren settled there—a wilderness of shifting sand.

Bruges during the opening years of the sixteen hundreds was seething in misery. War had brought forth famine and pestilence, and the flight of commerce had left thousands of working men without any means of gaining their bread; but there was still gold in the city. The fortunes which had been made in trade, or at all events a certain proportion of them, remained after trade had departed, and the monastic immigrants, as we have seen, were not without resources, nor did the possessors of the mammon of unrighteousness suffer it to remain idle. They made to themselves friends with it. Churches and monasteries were restored; the monks and nuns from the country built for themselves new habitations; hospices and almshouses, Godshuisen (God’s Houses), as they are at Bruges picturesquely termed, were founded all over the city. Thus was work provided for those who were able to do it, and a permanent provision made for the aged and the infirm.

The buildings now erected in no way resembled the sumptuous palaces and stately guild halls of bygone days, but some of them are sufficiently picturesque. Take, for instance, the Carthusian Convent in the rue du Vieux Bourg, with its seven gables, and mullioned windows, and beautiful Gothic doorway surmounted by three niches, with statues of saints in the style of the Renaissance—it has recently been restored, and is now the local of a workmen’s club, the Gilde van Ambachten; or the Leper Hospital, at the end of the Marché au fil; or the Pest House on the Grand Canal adjoining the thirteenth-century Hospice of Notre Dame de la Poterie and there are a host of others equally interesting, and above all and everywhere the little Godshuisen with their quaint gables, and blinking windows, and picturesque doorways, often with a niche above them and the image of a saint. They are not the least beautiful feature in the architecture of this beautiful city, and the number of them is legion. Some are large enough to afford accommodation for thirty or forty inmates. These are generally built round a courtyard laid out as a garden. In others again there is only room for six or seven persons. Some are for women only, some for men, some for married couples; each Godshuis has its little oratory; all of them are comfortable and clean, and all are picturesque.