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FLEMISH ART 
 A 
 
 CRITICAL SURVEY 
 BY 
 ROGER FRY 
 
 CHATTO AND WINDUS 
 LONDON 
 1927 
 
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN ; 
 
 e : ” 
 r 
 
PREFACE 
 a hex exhibition of Flemish Art held at Burlington House 
 
 in the winter of 1926—7 aroused such widespread interest 
 
 that the committee of the National Art Collections Fund 
 decided to invite the members of that society to a lecture on the 
 exhibition, which was delivered in the Queen’s Hall on March 24, 
 1927. The following pages are the text of that lecture with a 
 few minor alterations and with the inclusion of some passages 
 which were not delivered on that occasion for want of time. 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 frontispiece 
 
 Hubert van Eyck. The three Maries at the Sepulchre (Fig. 5) 
 
 Oo ON NAP WD DY 
 
 — ke 
 mw O 
 
 Le 
 ce 
 14. 
 Lr. 
 16. 
 17. 
 18. 
 19. 
 20: 
 “ae 
 27: 
 
 Figures 1-4, 6-11 following page 16 
 
 . Rogier van der Weyden. Portrait of a Lady 
 
 . Lorenzo di Credi. Portrait of Andrea Verrochio 
 
 . Pol de Limbourg. Ile St. Louis 
 
 . Miniature from the “Heures de Turin”’ 
 
 . John van Eyck. Portrait of Canon van der Paele 
 
 . John van Eyck. Portrait of the Artist’s Wife 
 
 . Hubert van Eyck. Crucifixion 
 
 . Rogier van der Weyden. Deposition from the Cross 
 . Rogier van der Weyden. Deposition from the Cross 
 . Petrus Christus. Portrait of a Carthusian (?) 
 
 Figures 12-22 following page 32 
 Petrus Christus. Nativity 
 Hans Memling. Madonna and Child with Angel 
 Quentin Metsys. Madonna and Child with Angels 
 Quentin Metsys. Madonna and Child with Two Angels 
 Quentin Metsys. Portrait of Egidius 
 Jerome Bosch. St. Jerome 
 Pieter Brueghel. Proverb of the Bird-nesters (with Fig. 12) 
 Pieter Brueghel. The Fall of Icarus 
 Pieter Brueghel. January Day 
 Frans Floris. Portrait of a Lady 
 Rubens. Adoration of the Magi 
 Vil 
 
23, 
 24. 
 25% 
 26. 
 oA 
 28. 
 20). 
 30. 
 a3, 
 
 Rubens. 
 Rubens. 
 Rubens. 
 Rubens. 
 Rubens. 
 Rubens. 
 
 [Mustrations 
 
 Figures 23-31 following page 48 
 Martyrdom of St. Ursula 
 Flight into Egypt 
 Portrait of Yrsselius 
 Portrait of Marqués de Legafiez 
 The Timber Waggon 
 Landscape. Moonlight 
 
 Jordaens. The Burgomaster of Diest and his Wife 
 Jordaens. Pan and Syrinx. (With Fig. 24) 
 
 Brouwer. Landscape 
 
 Vill 
 
FLEMISH ART 
 
 PART I 
 
 HE English are often accused by their too candid 
 
 foreign friends of being grossly practical, incapable 
 
 of responding to the things of the spirit, insensitive 
 
 to the refining influence of the arts. Those who have fre- 
 
 quented Burlington House in the past few months and 
 
 watched the crowds of people of all classes waiting patiently 
 
 in [close-pressed queues in order to stare for a few seconds 
 
 at a few square inches of painted panel must have felt 
 
 the gross injustice of this accusation—may almost have 
 
 wished, for their own convenience, that it had been a little 
 less untrue. 
 
 No—we are passionately addicted to painting, provided 
 we get the painting we like, and it is very apparent that at 
 Burlington House we found what we wanted. 
 
 I know that some disgruntled esthetes who had come from 
 abroad to see the pictures and found their view confined to 
 the backs of rival admirers, declared that this enthusiasm was 
 worked up by the Press, that the knowledge that a King and 
 Queen had flown across the Channel to see it had hypnotized 
 the public into a subjective appreciation. But strong as the 
 
 I B 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 forces of snobbery may be I doubt their power to compel such 
 strenuous exertion if it had not been rewarded by some more 
 solid enjoyment. 
 
 At any rate I, for one, believe that a very large public has 
 genuinely and sincerely enjoyed these pictures. The word in 
 which this enjoyment was most frequently described to me 
 was the word “heavenly.” The rhetorical question, “Isn’t 
 it a heavenly exhibition?” was addressed to me on many 
 occasions. I understood of course that this expressed deep 
 admiration, but I could not help being surprised by the choice 
 of that particular adjective. Had we been looking at the 
 works of Simone Martini, Lorenzetti and Fra Angelico the 
 word would have seemed appropriate, but what characterizes 
 the Flemish school throughout its whole course is rather its 
 extreme earthliness. Both its qualities and defects arise from 
 the fact that these people found themselves very much at 
 home on the surface of our planet. They were entirely 
 satisfied with the profitable industry of their cosy, familiar 
 townships and with the rude plenty of their well-kept farms. 
 They enjoyed the things of this life with so wholesome, so 
 uncritical an appetite that they loved to see in their pictures 
 vivid reminiscences of what was so familiar and so dear to 
 them. Even their religion became moulded to this habitual 
 bent of their character. It adapted itself to that and inspired 
 a simple unquestioning and uncritical pietism which allowed 
 even their conceptions of transcendent realities to keep a 
 
 2 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 homely quality and a childlike literalness. Even when the 
 Renaissance came to shake to its foundations the medieval 
 system, religion readapted itself to these fundamental needs, 
 and we find Rubens able to conciliate a frankly pagan sensual- 
 ism with an unquestioning and whole-hearted orthodoxy, 
 whilst his contemporary Jordaens could leave out all sugges- 
 tions of spirituality and revel unashamedly in the world of 
 sense. 
 
 Such then is, to my mind, the most striking and general 
 characteristic of this curiously homogeneous and home-grown 
 art. It marks it off sharply from the other great school of 
 European painting, the Italian. In that, the demands of the 
 spirit were more insistent, leading on the one hand to the 
 ecstatic religious art of the Sienese and of Fra Angelico, and 
 on the other to a conscious and deliberate rationalizing, to the 
 persistent search for universal principles,—towards a pure 
 science and a pure esthetic. 
 
 One instance of the different reactions of the Italians and 
 Flemings to the pictorial problem may suffice. As, at the 
 beginning of the fifteenth century, the artists of both coun- 
 tries began to explore the rendering of the appearance of 
 objects in space, they became aware of the convergence of 
 lines perpendicular to the picture plane towards what we call 
 the vanishing point. Van Eyck and his followers appear to 
 have solved the problem by careful and precise observation of 
 each successive situation; Brunelleschi in Florence instantly 
 
 3 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 sought for the general law, stated it mathematically and 
 launched the painters of Florence on a rather desperate ven- 
 ture, that of substituting for careful imitation the power to 
 construct even such complex forms as the human figure by 
 means of mathematical formule. The venture led, as all such 
 applications of abstract ideas to the infinite complexity of 
 nature generally do, to some rather absurd and unconvincing 
 results—as we can see in our battle picture by Paolo Ucello in 
 the National Gallery—but it led finally to a clearer notion of 
 pictorial space-construction. 
 
 There you get in a single technical case the contrast I wish 
 to enforce between the intellectual power, the passion for 
 abstract truth and for law of the Southern temperament, as 
 against the acceptance of the immediate, actual reality, the 
 uncritical and literal spirit of the Northerner. 
 
 And it is along these lines that we shall find both the 
 qualities and the defects of this interesting art. And at once 
 a specific quality of the Flemish masters greets us on the 
 threshold, namely their extraordinary craftsmanship, their 
 quick elaboration and their perfect control of the medium of 
 oil pigment. We are still left in astonishment at the richness 
 and glow of their colours, at the perfect preservation of panels 
 on which the tooth of time seems to gnaw in vain. 
 
 The next quality which strikes us is the precision and 
 accuracy of their outlines. If we were to accept as the aim of 
 drawing the creation of an image which reminded us in every 
 
 4 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 detail of some actual figure or object in nature we should be 
 inclined to say that they were the best of draughtsmen. If 
 we consider a minute and detailed verisimilitude a great 
 pictorial quality, then the Flemish primitives stand almost 
 unrivalled. The very fact that their vision is so quick and 
 unreflecting makes them satisfied with the vision of everyday 
 practical life, and by so much the more accessible to the 
 untrained eye. 
 
 Again and again at Burlington House I was struck by the 
 fact that it was just this everyday attitude to objects and 
 textures that aroused such delight. It was the transparency of 
 muslin veils, the glitter of jewels or the sheen of brocades, the 
 recognition of which, in the painted imitation, gained the 
 highest meed of praise. ‘The vision of these painters was so 
 little removed from the vision we employ for buying stuffs in 
 a shop that it required no effort of reflection to recognize its 
 accuracy and effectiveness. 
 
 But this everyday vision has not been the concern of the 
 greatest painters; they have sought to place themselves at a 
 greater distance from the phenomena of nature, to view them 
 with a more detached eye, to be less entangled in their imme- 
 diate references and implications. They have sought by that | 
 contemplative and disinterested vision to discover those more 
 universal truths which escape the untrained vision, distorted as 
 
 it is from infancy, by the needs of the practical and instinctive 
 life. 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 In the vision of everyday life we cannot see the wood for 
 the trees, we are arrested by the distinctive details, we miss 
 the more general facts. To take the simplest example, every 
 one sees at once the features of a face; we are trained for this 
 by the pressing need of reading its expression. No one but 
 an artist who has cultivated the contemplative vision ever sees 
 the head, ever notices those minute gradations of tone, those 
 almost imperceptible changes of distinctness in the contour by 
 which we grasp an idea of the volume of the whole head and 
 the relation of mask to skull. 
 
 Let me make this clear by a comparison. Here, in 
 Rogier van der Weyden’s portrait of a lady (Fig. 1), we have 
 a marvellously accurate record of all the visible edges of a 
 mask. The skill with which van der Weyden has followed 
 the movement of these contours is extraordinary, nor is he 
 without a certain rhythmic bias which gives to all the lines 
 a common property, so that they make an agreeable linear 
 pattern. It is a refined and detailed catalogue, or rather 
 map, of the features, but there is no sense of their relations 
 upon the more or less spherical volume of a head. 
 
 The plastic movements which the image suggests are only 
 slight variations on a flat surface as of a map in low relief. 
 They do not imply any wide co-ordination of the planes; we 
 feel clearly, that is, the relation of each plane to the one next 
 to it, but not the relations of all the planes together. 
 
 Even more typical than the treatment of the head is that 
 
 6 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 of the hands. In the first place they are far too small in 
 proportion to the head, a peculiarity of almost all Flemish 
 portraits which is closely connected with this absence of plastic 
 feeling. ‘Then whilst each finger is carefully outlined and 
 more or less modelled, the artist has fixed all his attention on 
 the intricate linear pattern which those outlines make, he 
 gives us no idea of the volume which all these fingers of the 
 two hands compose. 
 
 And now look at this portrait by Lorenzo di Credi (Fig. 2). 
 I have chosen the work of an artist who occupies in the Italian 
 school a much lower position than van der Weyden does in 
 the Flemish, in order that you may see the general application 
 of this distinction. At once you notice the much greater 
 amplitude of movement. Our imagination is stimulated to 
 grasp much larger ranges of relations, or to put it technically 
 the rhythmic phrase embraces a great many more elements. 
 We feel at once the rotundity of the head as a whole; detail 
 may be found in it, but the detail is seen after the whole, not 
 before it. Then again we feel the body in a quite different 
 way, its existence in space, its relation to the head and 
 limbs. Again the hands here have their own relation to the 
 head and body and their volume is clearly expressed. 
 
 It is important to note this capital distinction. It would 
 be absurd to deny—indeed we shall have evidence of it to-night 
 —that some great imaginative minds have expressed them- 
 selves in painting without attaining to this generalized vision, 
 
 vs 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 but in so far as they have failed of it they have remained in 
 what we may call a provincial tradition—have remained out- 
 side the great European tradition founded by Giotto. That 
 central tradition has always found more ready acceptance in 
 Latin than in Teutonic countries, but none the less the supreme 
 masters of Northern lands have abandoned their provincial 
 idiom and learned to practise the principles of plastic design. 
 It is thus that we shall see Rubens break away from his 
 Flemish ancestry, it is thus that Rembrandt becomes almost 
 the greatest of plastic designers, and that in our own country 
 Constable stands out as speaking the European rather than 
 the national idiom. 
 
 If I seem to have been underlining the difference between 
 the Flemish and the Italian tradition to the detriment of the 
 Northern school it is only in order to help us to estimate its 
 specific character more precisely and to enable us to appreci- 
 ate more fully what it was destined ultimately to bring in to 
 the great central traditions when in due time the two became 
 united. 
 
 For that very homeliness of the Flemish painters, that 
 naive delight in the things of daily life, that absence of the 
 generalizing spirit did bring in a richness of content, a 
 diversity and complexity of material which were of the 
 utmost importance. For the generalizing scientific spirit of 
 the Southerner in the end emptied art too completely of 
 content, gave to it a too cold and academic abstraction. Like 
 
 8 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 Anteus it lost power when it left the earth for too long. 
 Its force could only be renewed by a fresh contact with 
 that, and it was here that it found salvation precisely in the 
 earthliness of Flemish art. Neither Rubens nor Rembrandt 
 are thinkable without that native Northern background 
 of uncritical delight in the familiar aspects of everyday 
 life. 
 
 Taking now a wide general view of the Flemish school, 
 what I find is an art of painting growing out of the general 
 tradition of Gothic design. This essentially native indigenous 
 art of painting is marked by its literal imitation of familiar 
 things, its astonishing skill, its incapacity for the contempla- 
 tive vision, its ignorance of, and indifference to, the universal 
 aspects of form. But, given that naive unreflecting vision, 
 it shows astonishing quickness of observation and brilliance 
 and solidity of technique. 
 
 For nearly a century this school pursues its course un- 
 affected by the outside world—then comes the Italian inva- 
 sion. The Flemish artists at first are merely dazzled and 
 bewildered by it. It destroys their native practice without 
 building anything solid in its place. This period of hesitant, 
 fluctuating, and uncertain art continues for a good part of the 
 sixteenth century, but by the beginning of the seventeenth 
 the real principles of Italian design begin to be grasped, and 
 just at the moment that Italian art is becoming exhausted 
 Rubens takes the torch from the feeble hands of the Academics 
 
 9 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 and revivifies, by his native raciness, the central European 
 idiom of art. 
 
 If we can keep some such general scheme as this in our 
 minds the significance of individual artists in relation to the 
 whole cultural situation of Europe will, I think, become clearer; 
 they will stand out in truer relation to their background. 
 
 Let us then begin at the beginning. 
 
 Almost any miniature of the thirteenth century affords us 
 the type of that general Gothic tradition of design from which 
 the pictorial art of Flanders took its rise. It is essentially an 
 art of isolated forms connected together according to decora- 
 tive rather than pictorial principles. It is an art of traditional 
 types which are only modified in a slight degree by the artist’s 
 observation of life or his personal predilections. Its references 
 to natural appearance are of the slightest. Its main purpose 
 is a decorative symbolism by means of easily recognized and 
 conventional attributes. 
 
 A similar art to this was common to the whole of Europe 
 in the thirteenth century—lItalian painting like Flemish 
 developed out of that—but in Italy the type form of that art 
 was the fresco, whereas in Flanders it was the miniature. 
 
 This difference was of capital importance in determining 
 the lines which either school followed. For the fresco, being 
 visible at a distance, what counted first and last was the main 
 disposition of the forms, the large leading lines, the pictorial 
 architecture. In the miniature the scale is too small for these 
 
 IO 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 things to produce much effect; we are not very sensitive to the 
 general proportions, we look at once to small incisive details, 
 the expression of a face, the detailed shapes and colours of 
 flowers in a meadow, and leaves on a tree. We expect 
 interesting images rather than impressive architectonic 
 design. The fresco affects us almost like architecture—its 
 large scale is part of its effect—the miniature is a picture 
 book. 
 
 The Italian school being tied to the fresco was bound to 
 keep in view the large co-ordinating lines and masses: any- 
 thing like literal realism was too refractory to take its place in 
 such ascheme. It could only win its way little by little; before 
 it could take its place it required to be assimilated to the 
 necessities of architectonic design. 
 
 But the very laxness of formal design in the miniature 
 allowed almost anything to find a place. The most literal 
 imitation was possible if once the desire for it became mani- 
 fest. That desire was evidently present in the mind of the 
 Duc de Berri who was the great patron of Northern art at the 
 beginning of the fifteenth century, and he found in Pol de 
 Limbourg an artist capable of satisfying it. 
 
 Here in this view of the Ie St. Louis by Pol de Limbourg 
 (Fig. 3) we pass almost at a bound from the decorative Gothic 
 system to a quasi-photographic literalism. Pol de Limbourg 
 was unhampered by any principles of formal design, by 
 any rhythmic necessities when he desired to give a literal 
 
 II 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 transcription of any scene calculated to please the fancy of his 
 Ducal patron. And thus free, he finds himself able to treat 
 a number of motives which painting had hitherto never 
 attacked—the aspects of the countryside at all seasons—we 
 have a vivid snow scene—and at all hours—he does not hesi- 
 tate to depict twilight effects. There is nothing elsewhere in 
 the history of art quite like this sudden leap into the un- 
 explored world of natural appearance, and this was made 
 possible by the peculiar conditions of the miniature. And it 
 was this that set the key of Flemish painting. 
 
 The Duc de Berri had relations with the Netherlands 
 and particularly with William IV of Hainault. One of the 
 Duc de Berri’s elaborately coloured manuscripts, but an 
 unfinished one, passed into William of Hainault’s hands, and 
 there is every reason to believe that some of the miniatures 
 subsequently done in that book, to his order, are the work 
 of Hubert van Eyck. 
 
 Now I must warn you that in talking of Hubert van 
 Eyck I am treading on dangerous ground, on a veritable 
 battlefield between rival authorities. Some of these have 
 reduced him to a shadowy ghost-like figure, almost to a myth, 
 to others he is a great and clearly recognizable personality. 
 I am fortunately no authority. All I can do therefore is to 
 choose between the alternative theories the one which agrees 
 best with the esthetic phenomena as they present themselves 
 to my mind. 
 
 I2 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 Here then (Fig. 4), if I am right, we have a miniature by 
 Hubert van Eyck—certainly this is the work of a very strange 
 and original artist. Pol de Limbourg was a marvellous 
 transcriber of nature but very little of an artist in the proper 
 sense of the word, but the author of this miniature shows at 
 once a far finer sensibility to natural effect and a rare power 
 of attuning everything to a particular emotional key. It is 
 here the effect on the imagination of the vast expanse of the 
 flat seashore and the luminosity and multiplicity of the sky 
 that gives a strange and impressive significance to the Ducal 
 cavalcade; for this represents Hubert’s patron William of 
 Hainault. 
 
 Nothing else that I know in European art strikes quite 
 the same note as these miniatures, no other artist has used the 
 implications of landscape quite in this way. It reminds one 
 almost more of the attitude of certain Chinese masters than 
 that of any other Western artist. 
 
 In another miniature representing the Deposition one can 
 see that this mysterious artist whom I cannot help thinking 
 is no other than Hubert van Eyck was also a great master of 
 composition. Nothing could be finer than the balanced and 
 easy massing of these figures, and most noticeable of all is the 
 peculiarly intimate relation established between them and the 
 landscape. It is all of a piece, all consequent and consistent. 
 We shall not among all the other primitives meet with any 
 compositions in which the landscape takes its place so 
 
 = 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 inevitably, so unobtrusively and yet with so ae i an 
 effect on our feelings. 
 
 Whoever was the author of these miniatures he must also be 
 regarded as the author of the picture of the “Three Maries at 
 the Sepulchre” in Sir Herbert Cook’s collection (Fig. 5, Frontis- 
 piece). This was one of the glories of the Flemish Exhibition. 
 It is connected with the miniatures by innumerable corre- 
 spondences which I will not go into. More important is it to 
 recognize here too that same strangely penetrating imagina- 
 tion which is able to relate figures to landscape in an entirely 
 new way. For here too the mood of strange exaltation so 
 perfectly adapted to the secrecy of the visit to the tomb and 
 to the mystery of its being found empty is given quite as 
 definitely by the dawn light breaking across the wide expanse 
 of valley and hill as by the figures themselves. 
 
 The composition here is very deliberate. It is no merely 
 casual adjustment of the figures necessitated by the story, but 
 implies a strong imaginative grasp of formal relations. It is 
 based mainly on two diagonals which start from the sharp 
 angle of the soldier’s cloak in the centre foreground. From 
 this point the diagonals diverge to right and left like the legs 
 of a widely opened compass holding between them the wide 
 vista of rocky landscape in which the town of Jerusalem lies. 
 This main motive is elaborated by many details and subtle 
 variations, as in the poses of the sleeping soldiers, whilst 
 against it is played a kind of inversion made by the pyra- 
 
 14 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 midal form of the angel and the sweep of the robe of the 
 kneeling Mary. Throughout, the evidences of a powerful 
 feeling for unity in the design are very marked. No other 
 primitive picture at Burlington House gave one quite this 
 idea of a consistent formal harmony. 
 
 Hubert van Eyck shows himself in all these works as an 
 artist with an extraordinary intensity of imaginative feeling. 
 It is an imagination so intense that it moulds all the forms to 
 its purpose and the emotional key is of that exalted kind, has 
 that remoteness from everyday feelings, that we call for con- 
 venience poetic because it is the key of most, though by no 
 means all, great poetry. As far as I can see none of his fol- 
 lowers had this special power of lifting everything into that 
 rarified and intense atmosphere. 
 
 Certainly John van Eyck is distinguished from his elder 
 brother in this respect. If we call Hubert a poet, John appears 
 as a prosaist. He is far more interested in the literal facts of 
 what is before his eyes than in the strange and moving impli- 
 cations which the great imaginative minds discover in those 
 facts. John does not seek to go beyond and behind them. 
 But he pushes the power of rendering these facts accurately 
 and clearly to an unparalleled height. No one has ever been 
 able to give so true a record of so many facts without losing 
 his way among them. 
 
 Here, in the portrait of Canon van der Paele (Fig. 6), you 
 see his overpowering interest in the wrinkled texture of the 
 
 i» 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 old Canon’s skin. It is so great that the wrinkles are the first 
 thing we see. We see them before we grasp the general form: 
 indeed that is never given vividly to the imagination. None 
 the less John’s eye was so accurate that he records the general 
 proportions with astonishing correctness. A smaller artist 
 would have been inevitably led into distortion in the process 
 of following all those details. But here too it is the literal 
 fact before him that dominates. He reports what happened, 
 he does not interpret it; he finds no underlying principle or 
 law. It arouses in his mind no special emotional reaction. 
 He remains an incomparable reporter. 
 
 That marvellous exactitude of literal reporting without 
 any evaluation is so astonishing a feat that it arouses in our 
 minds a curious shock of surprise and delight, and from his 
 report we can even construct for ourselves a very distinct 
 character. Here, in the portrait of his wife (Fig. 7), we guess, 
 for instance, how poor a time the maids had in the yan Eyck 
 household. But except for the passion with which John 
 exercises his strange gift he remains neutral and impassive 
 even before his own wife. The inscription on the frame, 
 *‘Als ick kan” —“‘As well as I can,” is a naive confession of the 
 natural pride he felt in that gift of reporting what the vision of 
 life affords. For John van Eyck was entirely innocent of that 
 contemplative vision which discovers universal principles 
 underlying the particular forms with which it is confronted. 
 Was he, then, one has to ask, only the most marvellous re- 
 
 16 
 
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 porter in paint and not an artist in the proper sense at all? No 
 —he had one quality which does not depend on the accidental 
 nature of the facts he reports. He had an instinctive sense for 
 thythm of line and harmony of tone. 
 
 That linear rhythm is evident here in the delicate calli- 
 graphic quality of the contours of the features and of the folds 
 of the white headdress. It is not an obvious or flowingly 
 melodious rhythm, but it exercises a pervading influence on 
 the quality of the line throughout. His feeling for tone 
 harmony is evident in the delicate opposition of the pale flesh 
 to the white hennin. A less subtle artist would have indulged 
 in a coarser contrast in the hope of strengthening his effect. 
 John van Eyck is too sure of himself to need any exaggera- 
 tion. He observes always the exact measure. 
 
 But we must note here how entirely John van Eyck’s vision 
 is concerned with the values of everyday life. For those, the 
 facial expression and the character of the hand, are of capital 
 importance. ‘The expression of the body as a whole is little 
 thought of by Northern people who use gesture so little, and 
 so John van Eyck’s vision, so accurate where his interest is 
 engaged, relaxes altogether over the body. No volume pro- 
 portional to the head is suggested, no indication of the move- 
 ment of planes; we are totally at a loss to account for the arm 
 or to explain the position and action of the hand which seems 
 attached to the body like a turtle’s flapper, so little has John 
 
 van Eyck been interested in plastic relations. 
 ‘ 17 c 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 Although one of his most striking portraits, this is by no 
 means one of his best. Our own portrait in the National 
 Gallery with ‘Leal Souvenir’’ written on the frame shows his 
 linear rhythm in a far finer degree, and so also does the John 
 Arnolfini from Berlin. There the contours of the features are 
 traced with a wonderful sense of their rhythmic possibilities, 
 and a delightful intricate linear maze is followed through the 
 convolutions of the turban. The volume of the body is more 
 proportional to the head, though the design of the hands (as 
 usual far too small) shows how insensitive he was to plastic 
 continuity. 
 
 On the whole we must, I think, conclude that John van 
 Eyck’s immense reputation rests mainly on his preter- 
 natural skill in reporting rather than on the importance 
 of his imaginative attitude or on any remarkable esthetic 
 sensibility. 
 
 We must turn now to the next great figure, that of Rogier 
 van der Weyden, the slightly younger contemporary of John 
 van Eyck and the founder of the Brussels school. 
 
 In marked contrast to the impassive objectivity of John 
 van Eyck, Rogier’s was a highly imaginative nature. He 
 uses painting as the medium to express an intensely personal 
 and vivid devotionalism. He explores the means by which 
 to arouse the emotions of pity and grief, and his portraits show 
 a strong psychological bias. His vision is always subordinated 
 to these ends. He has none of John van Eyck’s curiosity 
 
 18 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 about the literal facts of appearance. He accepts the general 
 idiom of realistic description current in the school—and here 
 perhaps he relies on his fellow-artist Campin (whom I am 
 forced for want of time to leave out) rather than on van 
 Eyck. He accepts that idiom but does not enrich it—all his 
 energy is devoted to bending it to his purposes of dramatic 
 and psychological expression. 
 
 Even more than in the case of John van Eyck the under- 
 lying esthetic basis of van der Weyden’s design depends 
 on linear rhythm. He is at least as unconscious of the 
 relations of volumes or of their situation in space as van 
 Eyck, but on the other hand his feeling for linear rhythm 
 is more consistent. He is able to sustain a much longer 
 phrase and thereby build up a more close-knit and coherent 
 composition. 
 
 Hubert van Eyck clearly had the power to create highly 
 significant compositions; John merely put things together 
 so as to get them conveniently into the picture; but with 
 van der Weyden composition is again a definite mode of 
 expression. 
 
 His great masterpiece in this respect is the Deposition at 
 the Escorial, where a single long-drawn rhythmic phrase binds 
 together the whole group of figures which surround the dead 
 Christ. To illustrate this point I have chosen this Crucifixion 
 from the Johnson Collection in Philadelphia (Fig. 8). It is a 
 very original design, a genuine discovery of how to express 
 
 Se 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 a poignantly dramatic idea by the disposition of the main 
 masses and by the linear rhythm in which the figures are 
 described. 
 
 At Burlington House we had the opportunity of seeing 
 how van der Weyden’s sensibility to expressive design 
 increased in the course of his career. 
 
 In this early work (Fig. 9) the figures of Christ and the 
 Virgin build up together a simple system held together by the 
 continuous linear rhythm. This is reinforced by the repeti- 
 tion of the contour in the mound that supports the Cross, but 
 the saints and donor, though placed so as to balance fairly about 
 the central figures, are not in rhythmic consonance with them, 
 whilst the landscape, with its sharply cutting details, still 
 further impedes any sense of unity. And in the picture 
 all this dispersion of interest is accentuated by the use 
 of the bright, showy local colours in sharp opposition. 
 Note, for instance, how the Virgin’s white headdress tells 
 against her blue robe and checks the flow of the linear 
 design. 
 
 Here in a later work (Fig.10) Rogier has repeated the main 
 lines of the central figures, but he has found how to carry 
 his rhythm throughout the whole picture. The figure of St. 
 John is not merely added to it. It stabilizes and completes 
 the group in an admirable way, and the Magdalene’s figure is 
 so designed as to reinforce the central theme, as an accompani- 
 
 ment may reinforce and enrich a melody. Note too how well - 
 
 20 
 
 aS 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 he has corrected the treatment of the Virgin’s robe: how 
 immensely the passionate. eagerness of her gesture is height- 
 ened by the unbroken line of the deep blue mantle. Finally, 
 the landscape is also designed in harmony with the rhythmic 
 idea. ‘There are no longer any subsidiary and impertinent 
 interests, it 1s treated in a broad generalized manner which is 
 infinitely more in accordance with the main idea, while the 
 over-arching curve of a tragic sunset glow embraces and 
 unifies the whole design. ‘The expressive power of every part 
 is incomparably increased by this continuity and coherence 
 of the rhythmic structure. 
 
 In his portraits we find the same power of sustaining the 
 linear pattern through longer phrases than John van Eyck 
 could manage, but they lack the body and density of John’s 
 tone, they tend to become thin, to be even more merely linear 
 maps of the features, though maps which have a consistent 
 psychological bias. 
 
 On the whole it is van der Weyden’s influence which 
 predominates in the course of the Flemish tradition through- 
 out the fifteenth century rather than that of John van Eyck. 
 None of these successors attain to the force of the men who 
 founded the school. Nowhere do we find such impeccable 
 accuracy of eye as John van Eyck’s, nowhere so passionate 
 a sense of tragedy nor such psychological insight asin Rogier 
 van der Weyden. With Dierck Bouts a harsh angularity of 
 form tends to break down even the linear rhythmic system, 
 
 Pee 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 whilst he remains even less sensitive to plastic possibilities than 
 the older men. He becomes almost purely a narrator, and a 
 narrator without any marked imaginative point of view. 
 Van der Goes has a greater breadth of form and approaches 
 more nearly to Rogier’s rhythmic feeling, though he remains 
 far below him in the matter of significant disposition. His 
 power of grasping relations even in two dimensions is very 
 feeble, and he has no idea of relations in space. 
 
 None of these artists add anything to the expressive possi- 
 bilities of the pictorial idiom; on the contrary, they use it with 
 a continually decreasing power, though each uses it to express 
 his individual reactions to life. In so extremely condensed a 
 review as I am obliged to make to-night, I am forced to 
 concentrate on those artists who contribute some definitely 
 new material to the tradition, and I shall therefore not delay 
 longer over the artists I have named. But two other painters 
 claim a little more attention, namely, Petrus Christus, who is 
 almost the only one to follow in the footsteps of van Eyck, 
 and Memling, who belongs decisively to the Rogier van der 
 Weyden group. 
 
 Petrus Christus appears to me to stand alone in the art 
 of histime. His isa minor personality. I find in him nothing 
 of the poetic intensity of Hubert’s imagination, nothing of 
 the dramatic fervour of Rogier. The images which occur 
 to his mind are undistinguished and conventional. 
 
 Those who have written on Flemish painting have 
 
 22 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 naturally adopted the standpoint of decorative illustration. 
 It is no wonder, then, that they have never thought much of 
 Petrus Christus. None the less, he is the only Flemish painter 
 of this period who was able to grasp something of Hubert van 
 Eyck’s power of situating volumes in space. He is the only 
 one who sees appearances with something of the contempla- 
 tive vision of the Italian tradition. He is, in fact, the only 
 Flemish primitive after Hubert van Eyck who conceives form 
 plastically. 
 
 You will see here (Fig. 11) at once how strong a contrast 
 this makes with the map-like delineation of a Rogier van der 
 Weyden portrait; how the rhythm is no longer that of lines on 
 a surface but planes in space. There is a logical unity of con- 
 struction here which we have not found hitherto; a logical 
 unity which takes in the head as a whole, which does not 
 exaggerate the importance of the mask but which keeps a due 
 relation between it and the skull. 
 
 It may be only a curious coincidence or it may be an 
 explanation of this peculiarity of Christus that he is the only 
 Fleming of this period who was in close contact with Italy. 
 We know that at a certain moment he was in Milan with 
 Antonello da Messina, and there can be little doubt that 
 Antonello learned from him the Flemish technique of oil 
 paint. The two artists show the greatest similarity in their 
 work. Antonello continually designs his portrait heads on, the 
 lines of Petrus Christus’s, and his small figure compositions 
 
 23 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 show a similar affinity. What I donot know is whether there 
 was any converse iafluence—whether something of Petrus’s 
 plastic feeling \as not directly due to Italian influence.? 
 
 But not only was Christus able to construct credible 
 volumes, he pushed even further than Hubert van Eyck the 
 possibilities of situating them in a credible space, This 
 Nativity (Fig. 12) stood out in marked isolation from its sur- 
 roundings in this respect. Here we feel the space around each 
 of the figures and we realize fully their relatively greater or 
 less recession from the eye. Of course, in any picture which 
 has verisimilitude we know which figure is meant to be in front 
 of which—of course, when we see a tree drawn the size of a 
 thumbnail beside a life-sized face we knowit must bea long way 
 back, but in most Flemish primitive pictures we only know this 
 as it were by deduction, the space and the volumes are not clearly 
 present to the imagination as they are here. And this realiza- 
 tion of space implies a sense of colour as a plastic function 
 which is also almost entirely absent in primitive Flemish 
 art. By this I mean that the colours are not merely related 
 to each other upon the surface of the panel as the colours in 
 a carpet or an embroidery, but are related in space, i.e. each 
 colour must convey not merely the idea of a particular local 
 
 * Compare, for instance, the St. Jerome by Petrus Christus (Fig. 11) with 
 Antonello’s St. Jerome in the National Gallery. 
 
 2 I have since found that Sir Charles Holmes had already suggested this in 
 
 discussing the Grimston portrait which algp figured at Burlington Home 
 See Burlington Magazine, June, 1925. 
 
 24 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 colour but of that colour situated in such and such a plane 
 at such and such a distance from the eye, and that they must 
 mutually sustain each other from this point of view. Now 
 nothing was more striking than the way in which here the 
 various colours maintained their position and thereby aroused 
 a feeling of spacial freedom. It enabled Petrus, too, to realize 
 his volumes with far slighter contrasts of colour, so that there 
 was an ease and breadth in all the transitions. 
 
 I shall not linger over Memling (Fig. 13). His charm is 
 too evident to need any demonstration. We may place him 
 fairly, I think, by saying that he used Rogier’s idiom in 
 an entirely personal way. The quality of his emotional re- 
 action to the religious drama is different. He has nothing 
 of Rogier’s tragic pathos. He replaces that by tenderness 
 and charm. He begins that new tendency to exploit the senti- 
 mental aspects of life which we find contemporaneously in 
 Perugino and which declares itself fully a generation later in 
 Raphael in Italy and in Quentin Metsys in Flanders. But 
 with Memling this tinge of sentimental feeling is very dis- 
 creet. He never abandons himself. He has a certain shy 
 pudor which is very attractive. As an artist he adds nothing 
 to the powers of pictorial expression, except perhaps a certain 
 softening of the surfaces as of a faint haze, as compared with 
 the sharp hardness of the earlier artists. In many ways he 
 goes back on the past and reverts to the illuminated manu- 
 script. His delicately assorted colours have no plastic values 
 
 “5 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 —a blue will jump out here and there and assert itself as a 
 positive though agreeable pigment, just as the local colours 
 in a missal count as patches of colour on the vellum. Never- 
 theless, Memling used this pictorial language with so delicate 
 an accent that we could ill spare the page of decadent medieval 
 sentiment which he inscribed. It is infinitely more sympa- 
 thetic and accessible to us than the succeeding phase which is 
 conveyed to us in the ghoulish imagery of Jerome Bosch. 
 
 Before quitting this period of Flemish art and embarking 
 on the sixteenth century, I should like to read you a few 
 trenchant and disobliging sentences in which Michelangelo 
 discusses the works we have been considering. Some of the 
 Flemish pictures found their way to Italy, where their aston- 
 ishing realism and their marvellous technique aroused the 
 admiration of certain artists. They even led to some imi- 
 tation on the part of such Italians as Ghirlandajo, whose 
 temperaments inclined them to literalism. 
 
 Naturally enough, Michelangelo, who aimed at a more 
 universal and generalized pictorial language, was not in 
 sympathy with Flemish art. This is what he says: 
 
 “The painting of Flanders will generally satisfy any devout 
 person more than the painting of Italy, which will never cause 
 him to shed many tears; this is not owing to the vigour and 
 goodness of that painting, but to the goodness of such devout 
 person. 
 
 “Women will like it, especially very old or very young 
 
 26 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 ones. It will please likewise friars and nuns and also some 
 noble persons who have no true ear for harmony. They 
 paint in Flanders, only to deceive the external eye, things that 
 gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill, and saints and 
 prophets. Their painting is of stuffs—bricks and mortar, 
 the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and 
 rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and 
 there; and all this, although it may appear good to some eyes, 
 is in truth done without reasonableness or art, without sym- 
 metry or proportion, without care in selecting and rejecting, 
 and finally without any substance or verve; and in spite of all 
 this, painting in some other parts is worse than it isin Flanders. 
 Neither do I speak so badly of Flemish painting because I 
 think it all bad, but because it tries to do so many things at 
 once (each of which alone would suffice for a great work), so 
 that it does not do anything really well. 
 
 “Only works which are done in Italy can be called true 
 painting, and therefore we call good painting Italian; for if 
 it were done well in another country, we should give it the 
 name of that country or province. Good painting is a music 
 and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and that 
 with great difficulty. This painting is so rare that few are 
 capable of doing or attaining to it.” 
 
 I read this to you as a curiosity of contemporary criticism. 
 I do not ask you to take Michelangelo’s word as authoritative 
 any more than my own or anyone else’s. You must judge 
 
 27 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 for yourselves. It is evident that Michelangelo dreaded the 
 imputation that his judgment was biassed by patriotic feel- 
 ing and he asserts nobly the universality of art. 
 
 Patriotism, were I subject to that feeling in matters of 
 art where it has no place, would lead me in the opposite 
 direction, for we English are akin to the early Flemings in 
 our preference for narrative and illustrative art, in our insensi- 
 tiveness to the appeal of architectonic and plastic design. If 
 I seem to labour unduly this point it is because | am con- 
 vinced that the highest pleasures which the imagination can 
 derive from the art of painting are dependent on our under- 
 standing that harmony of form which Michelangelo describes 
 as the language of painting. 
 
 28 
 
PART LL 
 
 EXPLAINED in my first part that my programme 
 
 was to get some idea of the course of Flemish painting in 
 
 relation to the general movement of the European spirit 
 as expressed in painting. What I call the central European 
 tradition starts from Cimabue and has continued, now in 
 one country, now in another, till our own day. But other 
 traditions have sprung up from time to time and maintained 
 an independent local existence; these I call, in reference to 
 the main tradition, provincial. Early Flemish art was the 
 most consistent, the most vigorous and fertile of those pro- 
 vincial traditions, and it maintained its exclusive, independent, 
 original and autochthonous character throughout the whole 
 period which we surveyed very briefly in the first part of this 
 lecture. 
 
 We come now to the point when that isolation began to 
 be broken down, we come to the beginning of the Italian 
 infiltration. In the early sixteenth century Flemish painters 
 began increasingly to go to Italy, and doubtless Italian pic- 
 tures began to find their way into Flanders. ‘There sprang 
 up a crop of Italianizing Flemish artists. For the most part 
 those painters had no conception of the nature and purpose 
 
 =) 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 of Italian design as conceived by an artist like Michelangelo. 
 What they saw and what struck their fancy was a new style 
 of decoration. They had been of late increasingly fond of 
 using architectural motives as a framework for their imagery, 
 and here was a new fashion in architecture. The classical 
 colonnade, the round arch, the frieze with its rows of putz 
 and garlands—these were the new and interesting marks of a 
 Renaissance picture, which fascinated their first superficial 
 glance. It was a new fashion of trimming a design, a new 
 embroidery. The late Gothic embroidery had become florid 
 enough in all conscience, but it was sobriety itself compared 
 with what these neophytes of the classic tradition made of 
 their Renaissance models. ‘The puzti swarm everywhere, the 
 garlands writhe, the architecture is carved over every inch 
 of its surface, it is made of polished marble, of glass, of 
 precious stones. 
 
 There are few periods in the history of art when the 
 misunderstanding of a foreign style has led to more preten- 
 tious and exuberant bad taste. The very perfection of the 
 technique, the deadly mechanical dexterity with which these 
 details are executed increases the vulgarity of the result. 
 Nor did the figures come short of their architectural setting, 
 and those painters who had been to Milan to pick up from 
 his feeble Lombard followers the secret of Leonardo’s smiling 
 women, came back to Flanders to polish with desperate 
 industry the simpering rigidity of their Madonna’s features. 
 
 30 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 Time fortunately forbids our discussing the Blondeels, the 
 Pieter Coekes, the van Orleys and their kind, but one of the 
 first of these Italianists claims our attention, viz. Quentin 
 Metsys. Quentin was the sentimental heir of Memling. 
 Memling had touched the chords of the tender sentiments with 
 a delicate hand. Metsys shows less restraint. At times he is 
 frankly sentimental, even affected; at others he stops short of 
 this and then his power of rendering facial expression has 
 its full effect. In his accessories he showed the florid bad 
 taste of his day. We must overcome the repulsion which 
 the superficial aspects and associations of his work arouse, 
 for he was a very genuine and highly original artist. 
 
 In a more detailed study than I can attempt to-night I 
 should be able to point to slight indications in the work of 
 Gerard David, Metsys’ predecessor, of a change to a more 
 continuous rhythm, but in the main little had been done to 
 enrich the pictorial idiom and still less to explore new possi- 
 bilities of vision. But Metsys brings to appearances a recep- 
 tive eye. 
 
 Here in an early work (Fig. 14) his architecture is still 
 Gothic. In spite of its over-elaborate mouldings it is well 
 planned in its relation to the figure, but we note most that the 
 Virgin’s robe falls in easier, more continuous lines which 
 begin to reveal the volume and movement of the figure. 
 The pattern is no longer linear, the succession of planes is 
 clearly felt, and the figures evolve in a definite space. 
 
 31 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 In this later work (Fig. 15) Metsys has been converted to 
 the Renaissance fashion in ornament. It is a comparatively 
 restrained example, but' the proportions are none too happy, 
 nor does he relate the throne to the figure as well as in the 
 earlier example. But in the figures there is a new freedom of 
 movement. The body and limbs begin to count more in the 
 expression of the mood, the mask no longer predominates 
 unduly. The drapery is more broadly planned, less cut up 
 by a linear pattern of cross-folds. It falls over the knees, we 
 feel the weight of the stuff which models the form it covers. 
 
 We note too that, precise as the contours are, they have 
 not the sharp cutting quality of primitive paintings. We 
 feel that the contour is part of a plane which recedes from the 
 eye. We are not brought up sharply on the surface of the 
 panel by the edge. There is a suggestion of the envelopment 
 of forms by atmosphere. There is here, too, a suggestion of 
 the changes of local colour under the different incidences of 
 light, of the grey discoloration in the high lights and of the 
 wermer reflected lights in shadow. 
 
 Thic breaking of the positive local colour implies a new 
 possibility of unity in the colour harmony; the same light 
 will be found influencing all the local colours and giving them 
 a common quality pervading and bringing together the whole 
 design. And the atmospheric enyelopment is not merely a 
 question of a truer vision of appearances, it gave to Metsys a 
 new power of pictorial organization. 
 
 32 
 
FIG. 18 
 
 Proverb of the Bird-nesters. Pieter Brueghel. 
 
 (Kunsthisches-Hofmuseum, Vtenna.) 
 
 FalGee 12 
 
 Nativity. Petrus Christus. 
 (In the Collection of Henry Goldman, Esq.) 
 
oo 
 
FIG. 18 
 
 Madonna and Child with Angel. Hans Memling. 
 (Collection of M. E. Renders.) 
 
(bsqy ‘stsapp jauorzy fo uoy2a1]/09) (‘bsq ‘sstusag uostg ‘yo ‘9 fo u01499110.)) 
 
 ‘sASJOJ UTUANG) “SAS]OT\ 
 ‘S]JasUp omy YpM PY) puv vuuopypy unUENG ‘sjasup Yypm ppyg puv vuuopyyy 
 
 Ab See 
 es 70 
 
4 
 
 ue 
 
(‘quayy ‘sj4p-xnvag sap aasnyy) (‘4oupoy fo japy ayl fo uoyrayoj ayt uz) 
 "yosoq owmole{ ‘awmodaf “75 ‘sASjoJN UNUENG ‘snipisy fo pIwLj40g 
 
 Lee) Let JEL 
 
(‘Sjassnag ‘Sj4p-xnvag sap agsnypy) 
 
 ‘Jaysonig Joajaq ‘snipoz fo Joy ayy 
 
 Cla at 
 
(‘puuary ‘unasniufof] Sayrsiaojsiyjsuny) 
 
 ‘Joysonig Joleiq ‘Avg Aivnuvf 
 
 06 “OIA 
 
aN, ib “ H m: 
 es Pata Fa 
 
FIG. 21 
 
 Portrait of a Lady. Frans Floris. 
 (Musée de Caen.) 
 
eit 
 
 4 
 
 41, 
 
EiGae22 
 
 Adoration of the Magi. Rubens. 
 
 (Antwerp Museum.) 
 
a 
 
 i 
 } 
 1 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 To understand that fully we must consult his great altar- 
 piece at Antwerp. Here one can see that he is able by his 
 tone and colour envelopes to wrap up as it were whole pass- 
 ages of the design and subordinate them thusone to another. 
 
 Thus the whole of the rocky mass on which the 
 crosses stand, though it is full of incident and clear detail, 
 is held together in a single envelope of tone and colour, 
 the extreme distance and sky in another, and the figures in 
 a third; each of these then becomes a clearly distinguished 
 element in the design, each can be grasped at once by the eye 
 as a single whole and the dominance of the figure group is 
 made evident. In these qualities Metsys is not only an inno- 
 vator in Flemish art; his command of an inherited tradition 
 of oil painting with its power of fusion and subtlety of 
 transitions gives him an instrument which no Italian of this 
 date had quite mastered. 
 
 In other respects this is a remarkable composition. In 
 its contours it is clearly based on Rogier van der Weyden’s 
 “Deposition” at the Escorial, but by his greater command of 
 tone, Metsys is able to articulate his composition more clearly, 
 to hold within one envelope of tone the whole group of 
 figures around the dead Christ, contrasting it with those 
 farther to the right. The rocky mass behind is admirably 
 planned to recall and support the main group. 
 
 In this portrait of Egidius (Fig. 16) we were able to see 
 something of those qualities of Metsys’ art. There is still 
 
 33 % 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 a certain meagreness and angularity about the forms—in 
 comparison, for instance, with Lorenzo di Credi’s portrait— 
 but there is an approach to Italian art in the realization of 
 the volume of the whole figure and its relation to space. 
 There is a free circulation of air about it which is new in 
 Northern art. 
 
 From now on the Italian influence persists, but the native 
 tradition did not give way without a struggle. Medieval 
 ideology in one of itsstrangest and most characteristic forms 
 flamed up in a final outburst. A grotesque element—and 
 often an obscenely grotesque one—had always been tolerated 
 in medieval religious imagery, and it was this grotesque 
 humour that marked its last phase. All the wild conceits 
 which the “lawless and incertain thoughts” of medieval 
 times had begotten are collected in the nightmare visions of 
 Jerome Bosch, whose art had an immense vogue, especially 
 in Spain. 
 
 It seems incredible that anyone should have been turned 
 from his evil ways by looking at Bosch’s bogey-storeys. But 
 he was commended as a moral influence and learnedly com- 
 mented by Spanish pietists. That enigmatic and sinister 
 figure Philip II of Spain, who found delight in the freest of 
 Titian’s mythological poesies, found edification in contem- 
 plating Jerome Bosch’s pictorial sermons. ‘That aspect of his 
 art, for all its historical curiosity, must not detain us. What 
 is important is the strange paradox that this reactionary, 
 
 id 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 moralizing medizvalist was a born painter, much more so 
 indeed than many of his contemporaries, like Patinir,who were 
 sensitive to Renaissance ideas. Here, in one of his many 
 versions of the Temptation of St. Anthony (Fig. 17), behind 
 the ungainly Gothic figure of St. Jerome—though it too in 
 its way is admirably drawn—behind all the spiky horrors 
 and monstrosities which surround him, Bosch spreads a land- 
 scape of suave and luminous beauty which anticipates later 
 conceptions. 
 
 Even in his grimmest, most repulsive inventions he keeps 
 a richness and sobriety of tone and a delicate sensitiveness of 
 handling which are the last qualities we should have expected 
 from such a point of departure. 
 
 Bosch had then the persuasive power to check the new 
 movement. His inheritance was taken up by an even more 
 remarkable and original personality, by Pieter Brueghel. 
 Pieter Brueghel demands far more time than we can afford. 
 I cannot hope to justify my estimate of him. I must merely 
 state it as briefly as possible. Brueghel appears to me to be 
 essentially an illustrator rather than an artist. He is the 
 counterpart in his day of a great cartoonist. If he were alive 
 now he would try to draw for Punch, but he would not be 
 allowed to. There is at this moment, alas! no comic paper 
 serious enough to welcome so uncompromising, so desper- 
 ately genuine an illustrator as Brueghel or one with so deep 
 and bitter a note of tragedy behind the comic pretext of his 
 
 35 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 designs. But I repeat he was an illustrator—his designs are 
 the outcome of a moral and psychological, not of a visual, 
 inspiration. His morality has the robust and rather brutal 
 common sense of the peasant, it renders his shrewd proverbial 
 philosophy. But Brueghel could not have externalized these 
 ideas in speaking images had he not possessed great visual 
 gifts. His eye is the eye of a caricaturist picking out from 
 appearance just those telling contours which give character, 
 those movements that express states of mind. 
 
 In this region of the imagination, which is more often 
 treated in literature than in painting, he is a great inventor; he 
 has at times strange imaginative insight, and his imagery has 
 the sharpest accent of life. Form is then for him subservient 
 to the expression of psychological realities. He does not 
 speak to the mind directly through visible harmonies but by 
 the associations which his images call up, by their references 
 to actual life. 
 
 Here (Fig. 18) is one of his many designs based on popular 
 proverbs. As far as I can make out, this illustrates one to 
 the effect that “He who knows where the nest is has the 
 knowledge, but he who takes it has the nest’’; in which the 
 fatuous self-satisfaction of the theorist—the art critic, I sup- 
 pose—is contrasted to the practical energy of the boy who 
 takes the trouble to swarm up the tree—the artist. It is not 
 one of his most poignant conceptions, but it has the rank 
 savour of peasant life in the vigorous and rather brutal draw- 
 
 36 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 ing of the man’s figure and in the charm of his literal rendering 
 of a familiar countryside. 
 
 But it has no essentially pictorial quality. It has none 
 of that harmony of form which Michelangelo speaks of; the 
 relations of the forms to one another are adequate to express 
 the humorous moralizing of the proverb, but, apart from that, 
 arouse no emotion in the spectator’s mind. 
 
 But Brueghel’s imagination was wide in its range. It 
 was not always confined to the shrewd humour of the peasant; 
 he had moods now of more lyrical, now of more tragic import. 
 Of the tragic mood we have many examples, of which a 
 drawing of men taking honey from bees is a good example, 
 so monstrous and menacing do the figures become in Brue- 
 ghel’s interpretative line. Or we may take a better-known 
 instance, the parable of the blind leading the blind, at Naples. 
 
 The lyrical mood is far rarer. ‘This picture of Icarus (Fig. 
 1g) indeed stands out so singularly in his euvre that many 
 have disputed its authenticity. I cannot doubt that it is his. 
 Like so many of his fellow-artists at this period, Brueghel went 
 to Rome. No one, one thinks, had less reason to go there; 
 no one was likely to profit less than he by Michelangelo’s 
 precepts. However, he went, and, as we might perhaps have 
 guessed from the quality of his humour, he took no harm by 
 it. Italian art did not bite on his robust native genius. But 
 if Italian art failed to move him, Italian landscape clearly did, 
 and we have many charming drawings of Southern scenes, and 
 
 a7 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 in more than one we find him exchanging his native proverbs 
 for motives taken from classical mythology. That much he 
 conceded to the genius loci, but, as you see, his concession is 
 rather grudging, for Icarus is here reduced to two minute 
 sprawling legs in the middle distance and a familiar-looking 
 peasant takes the leading rédle. It seems to me that this 
 picture is the record of Brueghel’s response to some moment 
 of lyrical exaltation when the Mediterranean first flashed on 
 his astonished gaze as he made his way down the Alps. But 
 for all its exaltation the forms remain descriptive; its evocations 
 are through associated ideas rather than by their directly 
 expressive power. 
 
 Before leaving the fascinating figure of Pieter Brueghel, 
 I must show you one of his great series of the months. This, 
 of a January day (Fig. 20), seems to me almost the highest 
 point of his poetical interpretation of the aspects of nature. 
 The literary possibilities of painting have indeed rarely 
 achieved greater triumphs than this. 
 
 Throughout the sixteenth century Antwerp was the home 
 of a productive school, in which two currents ran side by 
 side. On the one hand were those who stuck to the native 
 tradition as interpreted by Brueghel, of which Pieter Aertsen 
 and Beuckelaar were the chief names; on the other there were 
 artists like Jan Metsys, Lambert Lombard, and Frans Floris, 
 who called themselves ““Romanists.” ‘They endeavoured to 
 be as correctly Italian as possible, that is to say, they filled 
 
 38 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 their pictures with crowds of “correct” Italian poses—but it 
 was still the old trouble which Michelangelo had pointed 
 out in the primitives, that of putting in too many things 
 each of which would have sufficed for a good picture. 
 
 But even “Romanists” had moments when they forgot 
 to be correctly and boringly Italian. In such a portrait as 
 this of an old lady (Fig. 21), Frans Floris found himself doubt- 
 less rather at a loss to know what the Giulio-Romanesque 
 translation of the facts before him was and fell back on his 
 native acuteness of observation and his inherited technical 
 ability. And the result is admirable. Nothing shows better 
 the innate qualities which were too often obscured by the 
 academic ambitions of such men. It shows, too, how, since 
 Brueghel had shown the way, Flemish technique was gaining 
 in freedom of handling and elasticity. ‘These artists were 
 indeed gradually evolving a manner of oil painting by free 
 scumblings over a transparent brown groundwork. That 
 manner, at once perfectly methodical and precise and yet 
 allowing of the freest modifications, was the instrument most 
 perfectly adapted to Rubens’s all-embracing genius. 
 
 Otto Vcenius, the last of the Romanists, was as dully 
 academic as the rest. His work is like that of some imitator 
 of Giulio Romano, but at least he organized his designs with 
 some lucidity. It was one of Rubens’s many good fortunes 
 that he went to school with so intelligent a designer. 
 
 In Rubens at last the currents of Northern and Southern 
 
 39 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 art coalesce to produce a new and complete style. In Rubens 
 all that wealth of experience which Flemish artists in their 
 love of the vivid actualities of life had accumulated finds 
 expression, no longer in tangled confusion but through a 
 clear and melodious articulation. 
 
 I suspect that every one who puts paint on canvas is 
 likely to be a little too much seduced by Rubens. He is 
 so miraculous a painter that beside him every one else seems 
 a little amateurish. This is not to say that he is the greatest 
 of artists, not even that he belongs to the supreme rank. He 
 never reaches the highest summits of imaginative truth, he 
 never plumbs the depths of feeling; his experience is not 
 transcendent; it lies within the boundaries of the common 
 lot. He is the great master of the commonplace, but the 
 commonplace realized in its fullest intensity and expressed 
 with incomparable perfection. 
 
 Rubens’s position in the landscape of European art 
 is unique. In him the whole tradition is focussed; for 
 when he came Italian art had lost the thread. Baroccio, the 
 one painter whose art held the germs of a consistent develop- 
 ment, had been overlooked. Academism in the persons of 
 the Caracci, and crude sensationalism in the person of Cara- 
 vaggio, had brought confusion and disaster. It was Rubens 
 who recovered the clue. Already Voenius had given him a 
 decent framework within which his prolific inborn talent 
 could develop, and his journey to Italy in 1600, his long stay 
 
 40 
 
 » 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 with the hospitable Gonzagas at Mantua, enabled him to dis- 
 cover the essential principles of Baroque design and elaborate 
 them to their highest possibilities of expressiveness. 
 
 It was thus that he forged one of the most perfect instru- 
 ments of pictorial expression that the world has ever seen. 
 
 One of the essentials of the Baroque style was the amplifi- 
 cation and enlargement of the rhythmic phrase. An example 
 from architecture will make this clear: In the classic style of 
 the Renaissance each storey of a building formed a separate 
 unit—with perhaps a series of pilasters supporting a moulding 
 on which were placed the pilasters of the next storey. In 
 Baroque the whole fagade would be regarded as one colon- 
 nade; the pilasters would be raised ona stilted base, and, run- 
 ning nearly the whole height of the fagade, would support 
 a single, much more massive, cornice, and perhaps an attic. 
 The whole facade would thus be bracketed into a single 
 phrase instead of being made of a series of successive phrases. 
 
 A similar enlargement of the phrase was devised by 
 painters, and to this was added a great increase of movements 
 in depth; movements, that is, at right angles or diagonal to the 
 picture plane and leading the eye back into the composition. 
 
 There was a lack at Burlington House of large composi- 
 tions by Rubens, soI must refer you to the ‘Adoration of the 
 Magi” at Antwerp (Fig. 22) as one of the best examples 
 of Rubens’s practice in such Baroque composition. 
 
 Here you see a single great curving diagonal holds 
 
 41 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 together in its sweep nearly everything in the picture. And 
 this diagonal is not built up by forms that are at the same 
 distance from the eye. The forms are arranged so as to 
 lead the eye gradually backwards until we pass out of the 
 stable into the open air beyond. Here the curve takes a 
 spiral form and, in the figures on the camels and the camels’ 
 heads, brings us back again towards theforeground. This curve 
 is big and bold enough to hold in its sweep the greatest diversity 
 of subsidiary motives which enrich and amplify it without 
 breaking its main movement. We can find endless minor 
 phrases which comment on the main theme. Another motive 
 comes in with the Madonna and Child. This has many 
 analogies with the first. It, too, tends to a spiral form with 
 the freest play of movements of depth. Its stronger accent 
 more than compensates for its smaller scale, and perhaps we 
 should regard it as the central theme about which the larger 
 motive evolves. 
 
 You will realize what a powerful instrument of pictorial 
 organization this is if you consider how vivid a sense you 
 have of this crowd of figures pressing into the stable, how 
 sharp the individuality of their gestures, how complex and 
 rich their gear, and yet all this is embraced by the eye as a 
 single whole with perfect ease. We ourselves are not crowded 
 and jostled, the imagined movements which we are invited 
 to make are everywhere free, the transitions lead our eye 
 this way and that, into the distance and back again, always 
 
 42 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 with the same easy movement. In short, it is a masterpiece 
 of plastic organization which unites the utmost complexity 
 of material with the utmost simplicity and lucidity of form. 
 
 Nothing is more remarkable about Rubens’s art than the 
 fact of his extraordinary feeling for volume and plasticity. 
 We have seen again and again how inapt the Flemish, like 
 all Northern peoples, were for such an imaginative compre- 
 hension of form, how instinctively they sought for flat linear 
 descriptions of the solid reality, and how entirely they were 
 preoccupied with organizing their designs on the flat by means 
 of contour and silhouette, and yet here at last is a Fleming 
 who not only grasps what Italian art had achieved in this 
 direction, but actually carries it farther. 
 
 In this he was helped by a very special gift, that, namely, of 
 a marvellous power of visualization; i.e. whatever pose of a 
 figure he might require, however improbable or extravagant 
 it might be, he was able to bring to his inner vision an ade- 
 quate and convincing image of it and project this on to the 
 canvas. I do not say that these images were always very 
 subtle in their interpretation of character as seen through 
 gesture—it was indeed a defect of the Baroque style that it 
 found its best opportunities in poses of a rather too demon- 
 strative and obvious eloquence, but none the less these images 
 
 1 A comparison of this with the original sketch in the Wallace Collection 
 will show how much Rubens has enriched and simplified the first idea in his 
 final painting. 
 
 43 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 which Rubens conceived with such unfailing resource are 
 convincing and assured. Tintoretto, whose love of rapid 
 improvisation demanded a similar gift, had nothing like his 
 power in this respect. Beside Rubens’s, his fluttering angels 
 and falling nude figures are hesitating and uncertain concep- 
 tions for all the vehement bravura of his execution. 
 
 I do not think that any of the pictures at Burlington 
 House gave the full measure of Rubens’s power in this 
 respect, but we may take the “Martyrdom of St.Ursula” (Fig. 
 23) as fairly exemplary. Here a great number of figures are 
 shown in poses so instantaneous that none could have been 
 studied by direct observation. Rubens had to rely upon his 
 visual imagination with its stored-up knowledge of all the 
 aspects of forms. And notice how perfectly all these forms 
 fit into the turbulent rush of the rhythm, how definitely that 
 rhythm is one of sequences of planes and not of lines, and 
 how the diagonal movement into the depth of the picture 
 space allows room for all this huddled confusion and gives it 
 a harmonious unity. Note, too, the dramatic value given to 
 the figure of St. Ursula and the executioner who is on the 
 point of cutting her down by making this a nodal point in 
 the rhythmic theme, for here the main diagonal movement is 
 sharply countered by St. Ursula’s gesture as she is dragged 
 down by the executioner to the left. This counter-movement 
 is again picked up to the right. 
 
 Sketch though it is, this picture gives one a better insight 
 
 44 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 than many into Rubens’s colour, and tone composition. So 
 I shall do what I can to remind you of it. The early idea of 
 colour harmony was of positive tints in certain proportions 
 placed side by side. We saw that Metsys had already begun 
 a more unified system by noting a common influence on all 
 the local colours which were subject to the same incident 
 light. Rubens carries this much farther. With him that uni- 
 fying colour of light becomes as it werethe dominant key of 
 the colour scheme, and he suggests local colours by very slight 
 variations from that. This key is so strictly felt underlying 
 a whole passage that it is surprising what brilliance of local 
 colour can be suggested by tints actually very far from 
 bright. A dull earthy red will appear to be vermilion, or 
 with more white will give vivid carnations—a grey that is 
 little more than black and white will suggest an atmospheric 
 blue, and so on. This method gives the greatest possible 
 unity to a picture. It has the utmost fusion and continuity, 
 which is then punctuated by brilliant accents of white impasto 
 in the lights and accents of transparent blacks or reds in the 
 shadows. No one else has ever mastered a technique at once so 
 methodical and economical and yet so flexible that it adapts 
 itself to an infinite variety of colour effects and the greatest 
 diversity of material. Naturally this also enabled Rubens 
 to use, at once more subtly and more forcibly, Metsys’ 
 discovery of the envelope, and he can contrast his envelopes 
 by very slight changes of key. 
 45 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 Here the right-hand bottom part of the composition is in 
 shadow, which is broadly contrasted with the bright light on 
 the St. Ursula group. But Rubens does not want to break the 
 unity of his design by sharp contrasts, so this shadow is strongly 
 lit by reflected light. In actual tone it is indeed hardly any 
 darker than the lighted portion. None the less, the envelope of 
 tone over all this part suggests to us very clearly a much stronger 
 contrast than is actually given. A single, just perceptibly 
 brighter note on the neck of the lowest figure gives us the 
 point de repére by which we judge that the almost equally 
 bright tones and colours around are in shadow. So solid 
 and broad is the general tone and colour structure that Rubens 
 can permit himself sudden accents like the black of the execu- 
 tioner’s armour without breaking the system. 
 
 We have gained some idea of the extraordinary power 
 with which Rubens handled the Baroqueconception of design. 
 Here, in a sketch for the Flight into Egypt (Fig. 24), we get 
 a notion of the freshness and spontaneity of his art; for | 
 Rubens was no academic; the astonishing scholarship and 
 logic of his designs does not prevent him from keeping that 
 close hold on the actual things of life which characterized the 
 Flemish all along. He has here visualized the Flight as a 
 very genuine flight. The supernatural nature of the guide 
 does not prevent him from straining forward into the darkness 
 with a very human and expressive gesture, as he searches for a 
 propitious place to ford the stream. Joseph trudges forward 
 
 46 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 with an appearance of effort, and the donkey’s movement is as 
 startlingly lifelike; opposed to these is the statuesque calm of 
 the Virgin wrapped in the consciousness of her exalted state. 
 Rembrandt alone could have come nearer to dramatic truth, 
 or rather would have penetrated a little deeper into the spirit 
 of his actors. But on the plane he chooses Rubens misses noth- 
 ing. And no less perfect is the setting: the gloom of the wood 
 from which the Holy Family are emerging, the shimmer of 
 moonlight on the water and the contrasting warm light from 
 the angel’s torch. All this is suggested with an incredible 
 economy of means by a few unerring indications here and 
 there, and yet the illusion is complete. And all this precise 
 observation, this close contact with familiar appearances, is 
 somehow conciliated with a rare poetic elevation of style. 
 Our attention is never called aside by the impertinent attrac- 
 tion of imitative realism, of mere verisimilitude. All these 
 vivid details are kept in their place; they do not break that 
 harmonious flow of rhythm, that easy, measured utterance, 
 which mark a great style, and which prompt the imagination 
 to a mood of elevated detachment. It is just here that 
 Rubens reaps the advantages of his double artistic ancestry. 
 He has by birthright that Flemish immediacy of contact with 
 life, and he has acquired the Italian conception of a detached 
 and contemplative vision of form, and grasps its universal 
 principles. 
 
 We must turn now to the portraits. The masterpiece of 
 
 47 
 
Flemish Art RAL 
 portraiture at Burlington House was in my opinion this 
 picture of Yrsselius (Fig. 25), done just after the Abbot’s 
 death from drawings executed just before. Rubens probably 
 knew his sitter well, as he owed to him one of his most impor- 
 tant commissions. Certainly he rarely painted a portrait with 
 such intimacy of feeling, such penetrating discernment. It 
 is a proof of Rubens’s extraordinary visual memory that 
 without the living model before him he could give so precise 
 a notion of the tremulous flaccidity of the old ecclesiastic’s 
 flesh—even to the want of control‘of the muscles of the mouth; 
 and he has given, too, all the distinction and refinement of © 
 character that still dominates the failing physique. Compare 
 this with John van Eyck’s Canon and one sees how much is 
 gained by the more detached vision of the later artist. For 
 here that surprising realism of texture does not, as in van 
 Eyck, impede our grasp of the whole. It takes its place, and 
 only its due subordinate place, in the design. Even more 
 strongly than the quality of the flesh we feel the delicate 
 forcefulness of the bony structure of head and hands. Miracu- 
 lous as the detail is, it does not conceal the more fundamental 
 characteristics of form. 
 
 A very different mood obtains in this dashing portrait of 
 Legafiez, the Spanish envoy to The Hague (Fig. 26), against 
 whom Rubens was pitted in a diplomatic struggle between 
 England, France, Spain and the Low Countries. In that 
 affair all Rubens’s carefully laid plans for peace were ruined 
 
 48 
 
 he 
 
Mariyrdom of St. Ursula. Rubens. 
 J (Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.) 
 
i 
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 or 
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 . 
 
FIG. 24 
 
 Flight into Egypt. Rubens 
 
 (In the Collection of C. S. Gulbenkian.) 
 FIG. 30 
 
 Pan and Syrinx. Jordaens. 
 (Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.) 
 
~ 
 
FIG. 25 
 
 Portrait of Yrsselius. Rubens 
 (Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen.) 
 
FIG. 26 
 
 Portrait of Don Diego Messiad, Marqués de Legaies. Rubens. 
 (In the Collection of Mrs. Gutekunst.) 
 
(‘yoorquyson fo javq ayy fo uorsajjoj ay. uz) 
 
 ‘suoqny “UuossD YA, 4aqQUy, AY T 
 
 yaa) ts 
 
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(puoyy pasfip “s fo uosa0Q ayt uy) 
 ‘suoqny ‘“7YsUuoop :advospuvT 
 
 86 “OTH 
 
FIG. 29 
 
 The Burgomaster of Diest and his Wife. Jacob Jordaens. 
 (In the Collection of the Duke of Devonshire.) 
 
(‘a4anoT ayq uz) 
 JaMnoig ‘advospunT 
 
 T€ “Old 
 
Flemish A y 
 
 by the instructions which Legafiez brought from Spain. But 
 Rubens was too much of a great gentleman to let this interfere 
 with his personal relations, too keen a salesman to let it lose 
 him a commission. ‘That he had no great opinion of this type 
 we may guess, but he has given him the advantages, such as 
 they are, of the self-conscious importance of a Spanish grandee. 
 If there is-a touch of irony it lies in the extreme interest 
 which he has shown in the armour, but then, from the 
 gentleman’s appearance, one guesses that the point was lost 
 on him. 
 
 It is in his landscapes that Rubens shows most clearly 
 the freshness of his outlook and the flexibility of his style. 
 For here he was breaking new ground. In landscape 
 he stakes out a claim that it required centuries to exploit 
 fully. | 
 
 Here, for instance (Fig. 27), is the general idea of almost 
 all that the eighteenth and early nineteenth century school 
 of landscape accomplished in England; all, that is, until 
 Constable started impressionism. And in another small 
 work at Burlington House he is seen rivalling Con- 
 stable himself, going almost beyond him and hinting at 
 Renoir. 
 
 And mark, it is not merely Rubens’s alertness to new 
 impressions and new aspects of nature but his power straight 
 away to give these an adequate pictorial interpretation: to 
 transmute them into the key of great style. It is no mere 
 
 49 E 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 imitation—it is not at all analogous to the venture of Pol 
 de Limbourg which implied little but imitative facility. 
 Rubens not only looks at what had escaped the artist’s 
 regard up to then, he both looks and discovers the 
 plastic and pictorial interpretation, which is a very different 
 matter. 
 
 Doubtless every sensitive spirit since the beginning of 
 human life has been moved by such a still moonlight night 
 as this (Fig. 28), but the actual visual sensations lie so far 
 outside the range of the painter’s scale that the problem of 
 translating them into clear pictorial imagery has baffled almost 
 every one. I doubt if anything at once so evocative of such an 
 effect and so coherent a design has ever been discovered even 
 by modern landscape painters. It is hard to dismiss so briefly 
 such a figure as Rubens, whose character is moreover in many 
 waysso puzzling. A great bourgeois gentleman, supremely a 
 man of the world, avariciously commercial in all his affairs, 
 loving power and domination and yet gifted with the most 
 alert sensibility to such spiritual experiences as lay within the 
 limits of ordinary successful worldly life. 
 
 But above all comes his power to turn all such experiences 
 into easy harmonious pictorial expression. In its spontaneous 
 ease of movement, its adaptability to almost any material, that 
 gift is in painting curiously like Shakespeare’s in poetry. 
 Where they differ is in the vastly deeper and rarer experi- 
 ences to which Shakespeare was sensitive. It is no wonder 
 
 50 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 that Rubens dominated his age. No wonder that Vandyck 
 was content to be his impeccable pupil, his best substitute. 
 Vandyck’s was a pliant nature, without inner conviction or 
 grasp of reality, liable to all external influences. 
 
 In his fine portrait of Anthon Trieste it is Italy, and 
 Bassano in particular, that has given him an unusual force and 
 impetus. It is a fine design powerfully realized. 
 
 It was not till later on when he settled in England that 
 he became original. But his originality consisted in abandon- 
 ing the higher purposes of painting and directing himself to 
 a kind of superior millinery. His taste in millinery is exquisite, 
 he is the inventor of new combinations of the politest, 
 most distinguished harmonies. But his harmonies are those 
 of nicely assorted silks and satins, they create no world of their 
 own, they remain decorative schemes upon the wall. His 
 was the most discreetly courtierlike, the most politely sub- 
 servient art that had yet been created. His images satisfied 
 the vanity of his sitters but did not venture to compete with 
 their own forceful personalities. With infinite discretion he 
 stays in the background. His pictures are the last perfection 
 of furniture for the drawing-rooms of the great. 
 
 Jordaens was a very different matter. One can hardly 
 estimate the force of character which he must have exercised 
 to free himself from the dominant attraction of his master 
 Rubens. That he did so at whatever cost is almost a title to 
 greatness. 
 
 SI 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 His gifts were so remarkable that we should speak and 
 think of him more often, were he not always a little in. the 
 shade cast by Rubens’s vast figure. And yet he is very 
 distinct. He is at once more crudely provincial and more 
 Italianate than Rubens. 
 
 Those of you who have read T7// Eulenspiegel will remem- 
 ber how, through all the tragic sufferings of the struggle with 
 Spain and the Inquisition, the Flemish persisted in a kind of 
 poetical glorification of good cheer, almost one might say of 
 gluttony. Gluttony is too ugly a word, but the Flemish 
 appetite was too robust for Epicureanism. It is the poetry of 
 Flemish goinfrerie, since we have no exact word for it, which 
 Jordaens celebrates in so many of his compositions where 
 even the colour takes on a kind of luscious ripeness and 
 juiciness. 
 
 Jordaens reverts as much as it was possible at such a period 
 to the opposition of pure local colours. Whilst Rubens 
 goes forward and anticipates the chromatic discoveries of 
 the nineteenth century, Jordaens looks back to primitive 
 practice. 
 
 This contrast came out particularly in this imposing and 
 radiant work (Fig. 29), which held its own even in the good 
 company of the large gallery at Burlington House. The 
 sonority and richness of these reds and blacks and the notes 
 of intense blue-green were almost too cruel to Vandyck’s 
 Whistlerian arrangements. One feels that there was the 
 
 52 
 
Flemish Art 
 possibility of malice in Jordaens’s jovial sympathy. He is 
 sympathetically humorous about the expansive and expanded 
 hausfrau, but his humour turns a little bitter over the pre- 
 tentious husband who has managed to get himself made 
 Burgomaster and will not let anyone forget it. 
 
 Jordaens keeps, then, much of his native quality, its 
 immediacy, its love of the concrete and particular, but 
 strangely enough there is another strain in his genius, At 
 times his Baroque designs are grotesquely exuberant and even 
 vulgar, but at others he aims at a more subtle, more austere 
 architecture of form than Rubens. The Pan and Syrinx 
 (Fig. 30) is an admirable instance. Here, for all the gross- 
 ness of individual types, the general quality of the design 
 comes very near in its restraint and simplicity to the great 
 Italians. 
 
 A few other artists of the seventeenth century remain to 
 be noticed shortly. Teniers, whose name once loomed much 
 larger than it does now, was not seen at his best, though one 
 picture, the large “Landscape with reapers cutting corn,” 
 showed how genuine and original he could be at times. The 
 disposition of the forms in which rectangular shapes predomi- 
 nate shows a daring simplicity of statement which re- 
 minds one of Poussin. Like that artist’s “Ruth and Boaz” 
 in the Louvre, it was an expression of a reaction from the florid 
 exuberance of Baroque design to a more austere architectural 
 planning. 
 
 ape 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 Sieberechts shows another strange excursion from the 
 normal idiom of the day. His landscape with a peasant 
 woman, a child and cows seemed prophetic of that kind 
 of photographic realism which we generally suppose to have 
 been one of the most deplorable inventions of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 But one other artist, Adriaen Brouwer, made a vivid 
 impression. Though Flemish by birth he worked in Holland, 
 and his temperament seems to have inclined him to accept 
 the Dutch rather than the distinctively Flemish pictorial 
 idiom. 
 
 Italian influence came later to Holland than to Belgium 
 and never predominated as it had there. No artist of any- 
 thing like Rubens’s power took up the Italian conception of 
 design. The result was that the Dutch developed a Baroque 
 tradition of their own. It was one in which little attention 
 was paid to any a priori rhythmic schemes such as haunt 
 Rubens’s art. Rhythm indeed was attained, but rather by a 
 delicately sensitive interpretation of actual scenes, by a nice 
 choice of the quantities enclosed in the frame, by a subtle 
 evaluation of spacial values and by an exquisite feeling for 
 tone and colour. It gave expression to a penetrating and 
 profound interpretation of actual vision rather than the power 
 so marvellously shown by Rubens and Jordaens of embodying, 
 by reference to actual vision, an a priori scheme. 
 
 Brouwer is typical of this alternative Dutch conception 
 
 54 
 
Flemish Art 
 
 of design. He is a stranger to mythology, whether Christian 
 or pagan. His imagery is limited to the scenes of daily life. 
 He found his inspiration in the lowlife of Dutch wayside inns, 
 in scenes of drunken conviviality or drunken brawls, but his 
 interpretation of these familiar events, though it may well have 
 satisfied the most naive curiosity by its precise verisimilitude, 
 conforms to much higher demands of the imagination. His 
 figures for all their vivid likeness to the most vulgar reality 
 have the mark of a great style. Clever and incisive though 
 the detail is, it is always held in subordination to the 
 necessities of formal harmony. His figures have that broad 
 simplicity of contour, that easy rhythmical movement of 
 planes which distinguishes the greatest art. Whether Michel- 
 angelo, could he have seen them, would have stopped to look 
 beneath the uncongenial pretext, I doubt, but, had he done 
 so, he would have recognized that Brouwer was not ignorant 
 of that melody of form which he adored. And Brouwer vies 
 with Rubens in the alert readiness of his sensibility. ‘The 
 little landscape lent by the Louvre to the exhibition (Fig. 
 31) proves this. The drunken peasants reeling home from 
 the tavern through the wood form, for his strangely tem- 
 pered imagination, an integral part of the poetical mood which 
 emerges from this intimate record of a moment when the 
 evening light transforms the banal realities of everyday life. 
 Almost everything that Brouwer did has this rare quality of 
 imaginative interpretation. When we reflect that he died 
 
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