Visitors information exhibition Mythical Primitives

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Mythical Primitives the gothic revival in the 19

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21.11.2015 – 06.03.2016

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Legends from the lives of the Van Eyck brothers

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In the 19th century, a great many legends and anecdotes circulated about the lives of the Van Eyck brothers in addition to the actual facts. Many of these legends had already come into being a couple of centuries earlier, in the biographies of artists by Giorgio Vasari and Karel van Mander.

Jan van Eyck is praised above all for his supposed invention of oil painting. According to tradition, and this took especial root during the Romantic period, the revelation of this secret to Antonello da Messina played a crucial role. It is said that this Italian artist learnt the oil painting technique from Jan van Eyck

in Bruges. There is also a lot of guesswork concerning relations between the three Van Eyck siblings: Hubert, Jan and their sister Margareta.

Joseph Ducq

Antonello da Messina in Jan van Eyck’s Workshop The small painting by Joseph Ducq A portraying Antonello da Messina in Jan van Eyck’s workshop shows the very early interest shown by a neoclassical artist for the gothic. Ducq’s restoration of Memling’s St John Altarpiece (St John’s Hospital, Bruges) must certainly have played a part in this. The centenary of the Bruges Academy in 1818 also led to an increase in interest in the medieval past. The programme of the festivities commemorated the invention of oil painting by Jan van Eyck with, among other things, a lecture by the neoclassical painter Joseph Denis Odevaere in which he spoke of Antonello da Messina’s legendary visit to Jan van Eyck’s workshop.

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In his painting, Ducq shows the moment when Antonello enters the workshop. Hubert van Eyck introduces him to his brother Jan, who is sitting at his easel and turns round to welcome his Italian guest. The young man in the right foreground is thought to be Rogier van der Weyden, who is putting a cloth over the painting equipment used by his teacher, Jan van Eyck. The woman with the white headscarf over a typically medieval ‘horn hairstyle’ who is standing behind the table must be Margareta, the Van Eyck brothers’ sister. She closely resembles the portrait of his wife that Jan van Eyck painted in 1439 and which has been in the Bruges Academy collection since 1808 (room 2, Groeninge Museum B).

The panel on the easel is a faithful rendition of the Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele (room 2, Groeninge Museum C). As well as this ‘painting within a painting’, Ducq also made several more references to the ‘Van der Paele Madonna’, such as the carpet with the double border, the bull’s-eye window and the image of the Madonna with its characteristic draped cloth.

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The portraits of Jan and Hubert van Eyck go back to an age-old legend in which two riders in the ‘Just Judges’ panel of The Ghent Altarpiece D are thought to be self-portraits of the brothers.

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In 1850, Edouard Wallays F showed an anecdotal history piece at the Bruges Salon, depicting Duke Philip the Good visiting Jan van Eyck’s workshop. Like Ducq, Wallays took as the basis for his portrayal of Jan and Hubert van Eyck the legend that takes the two riders in the ‘Just Judges’ to be self-portraits of the brothers.

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In 1842, Jean-Baptiste Madou E incorporated the legend of the three Van Eycks into a print for his album Scènes de la vie des Peintres de l’école flamande et hollandaise. He depicts Hubert and Jan van Eyck with their sister Margareta, who is posing as the Virgin Mary.

Madou copied the two brothers’ facial features from the supposed self-portraits in the ‘Just Judges’ panel of The Ghent Altarpiece.

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Another familiar face, that of Margareta as portrayed by Jan van Eyck (room 2, Groeninge Museum), can be seen on the left of the painting by Wallays.

Just like Ducq 30 years previously, Wallays copies the figure almost exactly. Yet there is a crucial difference between the two works.

Whereas Ducq sees this portrait of a woman as depicting the legendary sister of the Van Eycks, Wallays, following thirty years of art history research, knows that this is a mistake. He is aware that Van Eyck did not portray his sister, but his wife. Which is why Wallays shows a second woman who is showing her miniatures to Isabella of Portugal, who is seated in the middle.

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To evoke Jan van Eyck’s workshop, Wallays used the same tricks as Ducq had thirty years earlier. The Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele was apparently so well-known that it was sufficient to copy the carpet, the tiled floor, the capitals of the columns at the back and the glazed windows with bull’s-eyes.

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Several bottles of linseed oil on the left of the painting and a long-necked bottle of the round-bottomed flask type in the view through at the back are subtle references to the legend of Jan van Eyck as the inventor of oil painting.

Hubert van Eyck

Jan van Eyck

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Albrecht De Vriendt

The legend of Hans Memling as a wounded soldier in St John’s Hospital in Bruges

This work is a preliminary study for one of the murals in the Gothic Hall of the Bruges Town Hall. The scene shows a true event from the life of Jan van Eyck that is mentioned in the city’s accounts for 1432. Albrecht De Vriendt depicts the visit made by Bruges’ magistrates to Van Eyck’s workshop.

Another equally persistent legend concerning an artist arose in 1753. In that year, Jean-Baptiste Descamps wrote, in his Vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandais that Hans Memling had been wounded as one of Charles the Bold’s soldiers during the Battle of Nancy in 1477. He appealed to the St John’s Hospital, where he was cared for by the nuns.

In return for their ministrations, he is said to have painted the works that are still to be found there now. This fable has for decades appealed to the imagination and has yielded a great many romantic works of art.

The Magistrates of the City of Bruges visit Jan van Eyck’s Workshop

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De Vriendt too ‘quotes’ from the painting Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele (room 2, Groeninge Museum). On the easel on the left we recognise the kneeling canon with his patron saint, Joris, and in the triptych against the wall at the back we can see the Madonna.

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In a lithograph by Jean-Baptiste Madou G for his album Scènes de la vie des Peintres de l’école flamande et hollandaise (1842), Hans Memling is sitting on his hospital bed and is staring straight in front of him, clearly in a weakened condition. He is still holding his palette as the monks and nuns of the hospital admire his St Ursula Shrine (St John’s Hospital, Bruges H).

The Bruges history painters Henri Dobbelaere I and Edouard Wallays J also portray the earlier painter next to his St Ursula

Shrine in St John’s Hospital. They took the exhausted look on the face of the wounded painter from the print by Madou.

The ‘romantic’ fables involving Memling were undermined in 1861 by the thorough archive research carried out by an English resident of Bruges, James Weale. Wallays took no account of this, however; in about 1866 he dusted off the Memling myth once again. He shows a view of the so-called ‘Memling room’ on the first floor of the former friars’ monastery at St John’s Hospital. Memling is receiving a visit from Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian of Austria, who is wearing the chain of the Golden Fleece. The small boy in the foreground is probably their son, Philip the Fair.

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Auguste Danse

Frans Kops

As from 1863, there was renewed interest in the life of Hugo van der Goes, following Alphonse Wauters’ publication of several documents about the Red Monastery in Brussels. According to this Brussels archivist, Van der Goes spent his final years in that monastery plagued by serious depression, anxiety and periods of insanity. He was treated using music therapy: the only thing that gave him peace of mind was choral singing. The painting The Death of the Virgin K (room 2, Groeninge Museum) is thought to have been done in this period of his life.

The Dutch artist Frans Kops only started painting after 1900, but his work was still entirely in the 19th-century history painting tradition. He was one of the last representatives of Brabantine Neo-Gothic. In 1909, after training as an artist in ‘s Hertogenbosch, he studied for another year in Bruges. The city council granted him permission to study the old masters in the Museum of the Academy. While there, one of the works he copied was a detail from Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele (room 2, Groeninge Museum). His copies of these works were so popular in his native city that in 1910 he was allowed to return to Bruges to copy the rest of the paintings.

Hugo van der Goes in the Red Monastery

The romantic legend inspired Emile Wauters, the archivist’s brother, to create his monumental painting Hugo van der Goes in the Red Monastery (1872), which was immediately purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. The picture depicts the painter’s madness and has inspired a great many other painters. Here you see an engraving done by Auguste Danse after Emile Wauters’ monumental painting .

Jheronimus Bosch’s Workshop

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While staying in Bruges, Kops was also struck by The Last Judgement L by Jheronimus Bosch. Auguste Beernaert, a minister of state, donated this triptych to the City of Bruges in 1907. In the history painting shown here, which depicts Bosch’s workshop, Kops gives pride of place to the triptych on the easel.

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The two small triptychs by Eugène Legendre The two small triptychs by Eugène Legendre, based on medieval examples, establish a benchmark in Belgian neo-gothic painting.

In materials, painting style and content they are rooted in the late-medieval tradition.

The artist derived the painted inscriptions at the bottom of the frames from Jan van Eyck.

The Carton triptych In 1861, the nuns of Spermalie commissioned Legendre to paint the first triptych on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of their congregation, which was known as the ‘Sisters of the Childhood of Mary’. Charles Carton had set up this monastic community in Bruges to provide specialised education to deaf and blind children. The name of the congregation clearly refers to St Anne, who taught her daughter Mary herself. On the right we see the kneeling Canon Charles Carton. He is accompanied by his patron saint, Charles the Good, whom he greatly admired. On the left we recognise St Joseph with a white lily in his hands. On the side panels are two nuns of the Childhood of Mary. The deaf girl on the left is holding a sheet with the sign language alphabet while

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making the shape of the sign language letter A with her hand. On the right the blind child is fumbling as it reads Braille writing and the letters are shown on a board.

It is striking how in this small triptych Eugène Legendre almost literally copies elements from several late-medieval paintings that are to be found in Bruges.

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From Gerard David’s Baptism of Christ (room 3, Groeninge Museum M): e St Anne’s red cloak > the Virgin Mary’s red cloak on the back of the left panel of Gerard David’s work. r St Anne’s white headscarf and the position of her face > St Elizabeth on the right-hand panel. t St Joseph’s position + the colour of his clothes > the position of John the Evangelist as he introduces Jan Des Trompes to Christ.

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Madonna with Saints and Prioress Agatha

But the most important source was undoubtedly Jan van Eyck’s painting Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele C (room 2, Groeninge Museum). e The overall structure of the scene r The carpet t The step on which the female saint has taken up her position u The tiled floor i The two marble columns with Romanesque capitals (but gothic arches!)

In 1863, Eugène Legendre painted a second triptych, on the occasion of the silver jubilee of the prioress, Agatha. She is shown kneeling next to the Madonna in the middle panel, accompanied by her patron saint (St Agatha).

To the left of the Madonna stands St Bernard of Siena. This triptych was clearly inspired by Hans Memling’s St John Altarpiece (St John’s Hospital, Bruges N).

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Edmond Van Hove

Edmond Van Hove

Edmond Van Hove

Edmond Van Hove

Edmond Van Hove painted this youthful self-portrait with its very penetrating eyes after he had returned to his native city from his studies in Paris under Alexandre Cabanel.

He renders his brown hair and curly beard in great detail. By adopting the late-medieval style of painting and the detailed realism, he became known among his contemporaries as ‘the modern Memling’.

As a young man, Edmond van Hove’s teachers at the Bruges Academy included Karel Recour. In this work Van Hove shows a bust of the retired teacher at the age of 76, against a neutral brown background. Van Hove by no means idealised his model: the double chin, the wart below the eye, the crow’s feet and the wrinkles were all painted with a considerable eye to realism. He tried to combine his extremely detailed approach with an accurate psychological characterisation of the subject. The broad black frame emphasises the earnestness and monumentality of the painted face.

It was with this allegorical painting of ‘history’, ‘time’ and ‘legend’ that Edmond Van Hove achieved his first success. When he exhibited the work in Barcelona in 1898 he was awarded a gold medal.

This painting is exceptional in Edmond Van Hove’s oeuvre. Not only because of its monumental size, but also the light pastel colours, quite different from his usual sombre range of hues.

The young woman with the garland of flowers on the right has some of the features of his eldest daughter Anna. The wrinkly, almost chalk-white face of the old man in the middle is painted in a highly detailed realistic manner. He is tearing up a document with his bony hands. The sturdy, laurelled woman on the left who is trying to decipher some writing with a magnifying glass is a personification of ‘history’.

Around the Madonna sit five young girls who embody the arts: poetry with a lyre, painting with palette and brushes, architecture with a compass in her hand, sculpture moulding a figure, and music with a portable organ.

Their costumes are romantic 19th-century interpretations of medieval dress. Behind the open loggia stand a number of artists whom Edmond van Hove admired: on the left we see Dante, Dürer, Raphael and Michelangelo, and on the right Memling (with headgear) and others.

Self-Portrait

It is possible that for this portrait he took as a basis the Head of Christ O, which for a long time was thought to be an original work

by Jan van Eyck and which was donated to the Academy in Bruges in 1787. The black background, the frontal view of the face, the piercing eyes and the framing display similarities to the copy of the work by Jan van Eyck (room 2, Groeninge Museum).

Portrait of Karel Recour

O Edmond Van Hove must certainly have been fascinated by the exceptionally true-to-life portrayal of Canon Van der Paele in Van Eyck’s Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele C (room 2 Groeninge Museum). He was able to see Van Eyck’s painting as often as he wanted, since he was a student and later a teacher at the Bruges Academy, where it was kept.

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Historia, Tempus, Legenda

The style and materials of this work are evidence of Van Hove’s preference for the Flemish Primitives: the panel as a support, the triptych as a form, and the frame with an inscription. It was probably the influence of Hans Memling that led him to introduce landscapes into the background of his paintings.

Madonna inspires the Arts