Flemish art

“ None of this early Flemish art has the grandeur of Italian composition, but in realistic detail, in landscape, architecture, figure, and dress, in pathos, sincerity, and sentiment it is unsurpassed by any fifteenth-century art. ”

“ But one perfection of colour they almost all of them had, that agreeability, that gem-like lustre and richness, which I spoke of as one of the essentials of good colouring. And in this, even where modern art has professed to work upon the model of the Flemish school, it has failed, and by endeavouring to go beyond that school in brightness, has fallen very far short of its excellence; for in the very light key that has been adopted, and the prevalence of positive white, it has lost sight of that mellowness and illumination which is so great a charm in the Dutch and Flemish pictures. ”

“ Individually the savants may quarrel as to their merits, but, taking them all together, these paintings—for the most part by Flemish artists—prove that the great traditions of Rubens and Van Dyck, Jordaens and Teniers, have not been forgotten in their native land and that modern Flemish art is a worthy successor to the greatness of the past. ”

“ Witness the contrast between the bustling aggressiveness in the province of practical affairs and the metaphysical drift of modern Flemish art. To any one familiar with the visible materialism of the population in its external mode of living it may have seemed strange to notice how sedulously a numerous set among the younger artists of the land were facing away from their concrete environment, as though to their over-sensitive nervous system it were irremediably offensive. ”

“ The Van Eycks led the way, and painters like Bouts and others, though Dutch by birth, became Flemish by adoption in their art at least. When the Flemish painters fell to copying Italy some of the Dutch followed them, but with no great enthusiasm. Suddenly, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Holland had gained political independence, Dutch art struck off by itself, became original, became famous. It pictured native life with verve, skill, keenness of insight, and fine pictorial view. Limited it was; it never soared like Italian art, never became universal or world-embracing. ”

“ In the miniatures of the 13th century the art of England, of France, and of the Low Countries runs very much in one channel. The Flemish art, however, may be generally distinguished from the others by the heavier outline already noticed. The French art is exquisitely exact and clean-cut, and in its best examples it is the perfection of neat-handedness. English art is perhaps less exact, but makes up for any deficiency in this direction by its gracefulness. However, there is often little to choose between the productions of the three countries, and they are hard to distinguish. ”

“ Certain, nevertheless, it is that northern art had always suffered in some shape or another from an inveterate inability to realize any high conception of human breeding or beauty. Flemish painting under the Gothic and religious rule, from the Van Eycks to Memling, had in part made up for this shortcoming by the expression of strength with devotion in men, and of mildness with devotion in women, by an unexampled force and splendor in the color and finish of costumes, jewellery, armor, and by a landscape primitive indeed, but of much loveliness both in sentiment and detail. ”

“ We are, however, more strongly attracted by the master works of Italian painting, if we contrast them with this Flemish school, because the Italians, along with the completest expression of soul-life and the religious sense, retain throughout the ideal of spiritual freedom and imaginative beauty. The figures of Flemish art delight us, no doubt, by virtue of their innocence, naïveté, and piety; nay, in the depth of their emotional life they, in some measure, surpass the work of the most excellent Italian artists ”

“ Now in many places I have already spoken of the works performed by certain Flemish artists, of much excellence, and more especially of their engravings, but this I have done somewhat vaguely, and will therefore here add the names of some others, who have been in Italy for the purpose of acquiring knowledge in art, and who have for the most part been known to myself, although I have not been able to obtain notices of their works, they meriting, as I think, to be here recorded for their industry, and the labours they have endured for our arts. ”

“ Flemish art naturally was imported, and French art on the one side and Italian art on the other accompanied it. In the breviary executed for Queen Isabella of Spain about the year 1497 (Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 18,851) we find a curious random association of miniatures and borders in both the French and the Flemish styles, the national taste for black, however, asserting itself in the borders where, in many instances, the usual coloured designs are replaced by black-tinted foliage and scrolls.
In other outlying countries of Europe the art of illumination can scarcely be said to have existed. ”

“ Ennius. must here acknowledge the superiority of the Flemish art; the painter being really but nature’s mimick, is the more perfect the better he mimicks her.
Ast heic, quem nunc tu tam turpiter increpuisti,
Ennius. the delicate Van der Werf, whose performances, worth their weight in gold, are the ornaments of royal cabinets only, has made nature inimitable to every Italian pencil; he allures the connoisseur’s eye as well as that of the clown; and, as an English poet says, “that no pleasing poet ever wrote ill,” surely the Flemish painter obtained that applause which was denied to Poussin. ”

“ Pity it is, the time had not been long enough for more remains of it to have come to us than those that scantily supply museums. After the Gothic perfection came the great change made in Flanders by the introduction of the Renaissance.
It came through the excellence of the weavers. It was not the worth of the artists that brought Brussels its greatest fame, but the humbler work of its tapissiers. Their lives, their endeavours counted more in textile art than did the Flemish school of painting. No such weavers existed in all the world. ”

“ Their churches were bare of any pictorial adornment; their art was forced, therefore, to develop mainly in the sphere of home life. If we term Rubens the leader of Flemish art, Rembrandt stands for the highest development of Dutch art. Between these two leaders lies a broad field with many blending, interweaving influences, many local characteristics, in this magnificent epoch. The only way to approach the subject in a few brief sentences is by considering as one vast unit the whole period of seventeenth-century art in the Netherlands, both Dutch and Flemish. ”

“ The architecture consists mainly, not of private palaces, but of guilds, town halls, exchanges, belfries: the pictures are the portraits of solid and successful merchants, or the devotional works which a merchant donor presented to the patron saint of his town or business. They are almost overloaded with details of fur, brocade, jewellery, lace, gold, silver, polished brass, glasswork, Oriental carpets, and richly carved furniture. In order to understand Flemish art, therefore, it is necessary to bear in mind at every step that it is the art of a purely commercial people. ”

“ When the movement toward the creation of a national literature began to assert itself, the younger writers derived the method of their art not from a literary tradition, but quite consciously from the tradition of Flemish painting. ”

“ The boundaries of the Flanders of history and of art, however, cover a considerable wider area than these two provinces. Over in France a considerable part of the Department du Nord was for centuries subject to the Counts of Flanders. On the other side, to the eastward, the cities of Antwerp and Malines were for many centuries independent of the Counts of Flanders, but their people spoke Flemish, their houses, churches and town-halls were built in the best style of Flemish architecture, and they became famous centres of Flemish art and learning. ”

“ Memling was formed of milder stuff.... He was a painter of fairy tales, not of facts.... To lose oneself in a picture of his is to take a pleasant and healthy rest.”
The same critic adds this beautiful characterization of early Flemish art in general: “The paintings of Flanders were not, and were not intended to be, popular. Flemish artists did not, like the Italians, paint for the folk, but for the delight of a small clique of cultured and solid individuals. They painted as their employers worked, with energy, honesty and endurance ”

“ But admitting, as all must, a wide, nay, almost impassable, interval between the familiar subjects of the lower Dutch and Flemish painters, and the higher intellectual works of the great Italian masters, we see no reason why they may not be left to draw their own line of demarcation as to their respective provinces, even as is every day done by actual objects; which are all equally natural, though widely differenced as well in kind as in quality. It is no degradation to the greatest genius to say of him and of the most unlettered boor, that they are both men. ”

“ Amongst these we may class the social status of the Flemish painters, whose positions in the household of princes subjected them perhaps to caprices unfavourable to the development of high aspirations, or the contemplation and free communion with self which are the soul of art. ”

“ The mere sight of the temples and obelisks and monuments and inscriptions, in the places where their makers originally erected them, gives a sense of reality and interest to them all that no amount of study under alien conditions can possibly equal. We have all of us felt that the only place to observe Flemish art to the greatest advantage is at Ghent and Bruges and Brussels and Antwerp ”

“ Here as with us, the renewal of the moral world is the renewal of the ideal world; the Flemish and Dutch art of the seventeenth century, like the French art and literature of the nineteenth century, is the reaction of a vast tragedy performed for thirty years at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. ”

“ Finally, the development of German and Flemish art is characterized in a complete identification of itself with the ordinary life of the Present; and, along with this, in a unified system of the most varied modes of presentation, which, both in respect to their content and technique, are distinct from one another and independently elaborated. ”

“ Professor cares nothing for either of these aspects of his career, but looks upon him as great for all time because he was an ardent friend and patron of the fine arts.
In this she is undoubtedly right, for no greater glory belongs to any of the long line of princes who ruled over Flanders than that which is associated with his reign—the birth at Bruges of the art of painting with oils and of the wonderful school of painting represented by the early Flemish masters. ”

“ The extraordinary delicacy and minuteness of detail of this microscopic work baffle description. There is another such a piece, also Flemish, in the Wallace collection which rivals that just referred to in misapplied talent. For, marvellous as these works of art are, they fail to satisfy. They make one’s eyes ache, they worry one as to how the result could ever have been obtained, and after the first astonishment one must ever feel that the same work of art on a scale large enough for a cathedral could have been carved with half the labour. ”

“ They almost always paint man in a well-to-do condition and content with his lot. When they exalt him it is without raising him above his terrestrial condition. The Flemish school of the seventeenth century does no more than expand his appetite, his lusts, his energy and his gayety. Generally they leave him as he is. The Dutch school confines itself to reproducing the repose of the bourgeois interior, the comforts of shop and farm, out-door sports and tavern enjoyments, all the petty satisfactions of an orderly and tranquil existence. Nothing could be better adapted to painting ”

“ It contains some curious old German pictures; Städel having been, like others, smitten with the mania of buying Van Eyks and Hemlings and Schoréels. Here, however, these old masters, as part of a school, or history of art, are well placed. There are a few fine Flemish paintings—and, in particular, a wondrous portrait by Flinck, which you must see. It is a lady in black, on the left side of the door—of—I forget which room—but you cannot miss it: those soft eyes will look out at you, till you will feel inclined to ask her name, and wonder the lips do not unclose to answer you. ”

“ We have already mentioned the extraordinary freedom and ease of the Flemish work of that period. Every beautiful object was made use of for pictorial effect. Children, birds, jewels, shells, as well as fruit and flowers, are to be found. They particularly excelled in painting pearls. One border is green, with chains and ropes of pearls strewn all over it. The calendar represents domestic scenes, each strongly surrounded with a double gold line, the written part being simply left out in the middle, so that the scene forms its border. ”

“ The invention of the oil medium by the painters of Flanders, and its gradual adoption by the Venetians and other schools of Italy for all purposes except the external decorations of buildings, added enormously to the resources of the art in rivalry with nature, and to the splendour of its results as objects of pride and luxury. The glories of matured Italian art reacted, not always favourably, on the north. The great days of Flemish painting had been from about 1430 to 1500, before any appreciable influence of the Renaissance had touched the schools of Brussels, of Bruges or of Antwerp. ”