Some Thoughts on Flemish Painting.
by Honor Brooke.
Volume 4, 1893/4, pgs. 576-580
[Honor Florence Brooke, 1861-1940, was the oldest daughter of Stopford Brooke. Lewis Carroll took a picture of her with two sisters; you can see it in this blog post, "My Great Aunt Honor Brooke".]
Part II.
In the National gallery at London there is a picture of a newly married pair, [the Arnolfini portrait] painted when John Van Eyck was at the height of his greatness [1432 or 1434]. It bears his initials, and is supposed by some to be a portrait of himself and his wife. At first sight, one is struck by the exceeding plainness of the faces, especially that of the woman; for she is florid, as any Fleming could well be, with small eyes, and light hair well brushed off her forehead, and concealed beneath a tight fitting cap. The husband wears a broad beaver hat, over shadowing a countenance equally placid and expressionless, and they hold each other's hands in a very stiff and formal way. But who is to expect that every portrait is to be beautiful? That would be an absurdity; but one does expect a good artist to paint beautifully; and here this expectation is entirely fulfilled. Nothing can exceed the delicacy and truth in every part of the work, and the depth and richness of its lines. The figures are stiff, but the painting is wonderful, it shines like a gem, and looks in as perfect preservation as the day it came from Van Eyck's hands. It is worthy of careful study, even although, look as long as you like, you will never grow to like the faces. But in looking at a portrait, the notion of whether one likes the face or not is of very little consequence, and ought to be put aside until one has thought of other things; such as whether the portrait looks as if it really resembled the person it is intended for; whether it is truthful, faithful, and fine in execution; so worked out that the character of the person appears, by the artist having dwelt on such points as were most salient. Looked at in this way we find, at length, that we are interested in other things besides deciding if the face, expression, &c. is to our taste or not. Strange as it may seem, all great artists did not care for beauty in their models. Look at the etchings of Rembrandt, he rather liked ugly people, and yet he was a great artist. He etched his own portrait about thirty times over; he had a picturesque face, and as such he thought it as good a subject as he was likely to find, and his egotism was purely artistic; but what interested him more than beauty was the thoughtful faces of mature and intelligent men.
Another Fleming of rare merit is Hans Memling, his name is associated with the Van Eycks, as an artist of the same school. His master-pieces are found at Bruges in the Hospital of St. John, and in the Academy. Little is known about this painter; there is a pretty story related of him, but unfortunately not credited now. It is that he served under the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, and that sick and exhausted by wounds received in the battles of Granson and Nancy, he came to Bruges, and begged admittance into the Hospital of St. John. He was taken in, tended, and nursed there, and in grateful acknowledgment of such good, he painted the story of St. Ursula on the reliquary there which was said to contain one of her arms. However legendary this story may appear, it is certain that the shrine is still kept in the same hospital; the nuns still nurse the sick, the door is still open to the suffering, and the whole place has that quiet tranquil look, which might well attract a wearied man to its gates.
This shrine, its shape like the nave of a gothic church, has three compartments on either side, in each of which a scene from the life of St. Ursula is painted. Memling is here more tender in color than Van Eyck, and the space being smaller to work in, his figures are more graceful and exquisite; indeed nothing could be more beautiful than the finish and charming design of this work. The scene of boat landing at Cologne in the beginning of the journey, and the virgins disembarking, is full of charm; Ursula, clothed in princely purple, her hair braided with pearls, steps on shore, whilst a virgin at her side carries a casket of jewels. In the distance stands the cathedral, uncompleted, as it used to be a few years ago. The return from Rome, and the landing at the same place, only to meet their martyrdom at the hands of the Huns, is the subject of another compartment; for just as the sailors push the boats from the shore, and before all are on board, the heathen archers let fly their arrows amongst the maidens, some of whom cower behind the rigging, or cover their faces with their hands, unable to look at the murder of their companions--all in various attitudes of terror and resignation. St. Ursula is alone unmoved, her figure is touching, through its quaint grace, one hand is put out as if unconsciously to ward off the arrow, while the archer who is very close by, is using unncessary energy to let fly from his bow.
In the same hospital is his "Marriage of St. Catherine," [Probably painted in 1486] which I must mention, for as regards subject and arrangement it is a very typical picture of these early painters. A famous work, very poetical and most impressive in character and full of sumptuous and delicate lines. The Virgin is placed in the centre, and two angels hold a crown with much grace over her head; beside her kneels St. Catherine, on whose finger the beautiful Child places a ring of betrothal; the saint is arrayed as a princess, in a splendid robe of a deep shadowy green colour, which falls round her in rich folds, a light veil falls from her forehead, and over her long auburn hair, and jewels sparkle on her person. Many of my readers will be able to conjure up some of the various different conceptions they may have seen of her in Art, all more or less ethereal and beautiful. But here we have nothing specially saintly or devout, the expression is that of one who is wholly taken up in a matter-of-fact way, with what is going on, without any kind of rapture whatever; divest her of her rich robe, her veil, and her jewels, and she would be nothing but an ordinary Fleming, very excellent but not interesting. But I must make one exception; there is a certain nobility in the forehead and upper part of the head which redeems it from the common place. It is this want of devotional expression which strikes one so much in these early Flemish works, and which separates them from their Italian contemporaries. But we must remember that these artists who attained to so much excellence had none of the classic works of antiquity to guide the, and no great masters to imitate; the path they struck out was wholly original, and was one of intense honesty and fearless industry, without much sentiment or delight in the ideal.
However, standing behind the Virgin is a charming angel, who holds the keyboard of an organ in one hand, and seems to be playing divinely with the other. St. Barbara is here represented as quite a literary character, I have seldom seen a face so absorbed in reading, whilst an angel in a flowing green robe holds her book open before her. I wonder why the Flemish painters so often place books in the hands of their female saints, I remember no instance of it in early Italian art, if a book is there at all it is in the hands of the Evangelists or the doctors of the Church. I am inclined to think that it quite belongs to the northern art.
Another famous artist of the 15th century was Roger van der Weyden. He was the pupil of Van Eyck, and he it was who formed the elegant and graceful style of Memling. He was born in Tournai, early in the 15th century. In 1432 we find him settled in Brussels, with the title of "town painter," but his influence spread into every part of the Netherlands, and far away to the eastward in the various provinces of Southern Germany. He is the first Flemish painter on record who went to Italy, and returned, unaltered, after seeing the masterpieces in Tuscany. We may presume that the old Fleming wandered into the churches at Florence, adorned by Giotto, and Orcagna, and [Fra] Angelico, but there is no trace of the influence of a grander and sweeter style in any of his paintings. These are characterised by an extreme earnestness of feeling, which we cannot help being touched by, the subjects chosen are those which awaken grief and pity, but an excessive realism pervades his work, and whilst we are charmed with the atmosphere which pervades the landscapes in the masterpieces of the Van Eycks, we are struck (in those by Van der Weyden) by the absence of shadow, and the distance being finished with the same extreme care as objects in the foreground. Germany is indebted to him in the person of Albert Dürer, for he fashioned his style on that of Martin Schön, a pupil of Vander Weyden. It was through the influence of this master that the realistic tendency of the Van Eycks spread throughout Germany, and schools were set up in Ghent and Brussels. I have mentioned the ancient school of Cologne, and its being characterised by religious sentiment. This school was soon supplanted by the Flemish, which changed its character of religious aspiration into one of grater materialism. At Louvain, one Dietrick Stuerbout [probably Dieric Bouts] became the earliest distinguished historical painter of Holland, and was a notable disciple of Van der Weyden. There are a crowd of other painters, who preserved the nationality of Flemish painting, but it slowly faded into a pale artistic light until the time of Rubens, of whom I say nothing, as he, with his great pupil, Van Dyck, belong to the second period of Flemish art.
Art was well protected in Flanders, particularly after the accession of the House of France to the throne of Burgundy. There were guilds, comprising all those who could handle the brush; and painters were considered the most respectable of all the members of trades. A rivalry existed between the cities as to their works of art, and a strong spirit of steady emulation kept it healthily alive; one might wonder, such being the case, why we find so little trace of art in the Netherlands; but one only has to remember the foreign despotism to which the country was subjected, the fury of its religious wars, and the havoc of the iconoclasts, to account for it. So that art in Belgium is now chiefly represented by churches and town halls.
I think we shall find a reason for the decline of Flemish painting when it had reached its greatest pinnacle of greatness in Italy--if we consider the tendencies of the two countries. The Flemings followed the tendency to naturalism and the reproducing of the real, and gradually became simple imitators, making their art servile portraiture; whilst on the other hand they perfected the process of coloring to such a degree, that they helped to found the Venetian School. The great Masters of Tuscany [Botticelli] and Umbria [Perugino] founded their art on the perfection of form, in seeing the ideal in nature, in instinctively seizing on the fittest thing to paint, and allowing their imagination to shape it. They turned towards the beautiful as naturally as a flower turns ot the sun. If this was not the case with the early Flemish painters, it rose from the material conditions the artist had around him not being beautiful, or from some inherent want in his nature. But in spite of all the progress that Art made (subsequent to the time I have been treating of), we shall not find again anything to rival the purity of color, the clear edge, and serene precision of the touch of the brothers Van Eyck.
Proofread by LNL, Jun. 2023