GERARD DAVID
The reconstruction and the rescuing from oblivion of the artistic personality of Gerard David, begun by Mr. Weale and completed by Freiherr von Bodenhausen, is one of the triumphs of the modern scientific method of criticism. The Louvre is fortunate in possessing two important examples from the brush of this master, who, born at Ouwater in Holland about 1460, was in his early studies influenced by Albert van Ouwater, but, after settling at Bruges in 1483, came under the spell of Van Eyck, Bouts, and above all of Memlinc, whom he succeeded as leader of the Bruges school. On his death in 1523, the supremacy of that school came to an end, and passed on to the city of Antwerp, which by that time had also superseded Bruges as a commercial centre. Gerard David was not Memlinc’s equal as regards intimate charm, but in his work is to be found a summing-up of all the achievement of the Flemish Quattrocento—“the last concentrated expression of the aims of all the great masters of that fertile age.”
PLATE XVII.—HANS MEMLINC
(1430?–1494)
EARLY FLEMISH SCHOOL
No.—[4].—PORTRAIT OF AN OLD LADY
She is seen in full face and at half-length, wearing the costume of the period; her hands are superposed; landscape background to the left, with a winding sandy path. A porphyry column to the right.
Painted in oil on panel.
1 ft. 2¼ in. × 1 ft. (0·36 × 0·30.)
[ [4] This picture has not yet received an official number.
After having been successively attributed to Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memlinc, and David’s pupil Ysenbrant, the Marriage at Cana (No. 1957, [Plate XVIII.]) is now generally admitted to be designed and partly executed by Gerard David, although the panel shows unmistakable evidence of being completed by another and less skilful hand. Mr. Weale has shown, on the strength of a certain document, that the picture may have been finished by Ysenbrant, but he has been unable to establish that the document quoted by him refers to this particular picture. There can be no doubt that David himself painted the figure of the Donor, kneeling on the left, a marvellous example of early portraiture, and the Donor’s son, the Christ, and the boy carrying the cake. Some of the other heads are almost wooden in their hardness. The head of the Dominican looking into the hall through an opening beyond which is to be seen the Place du Saint-Sang, at Bruges, is clearly an afterthought, and is introduced so clumsily that the wall and the page-boy with the cake-dish really leave no room for the friar’s body. There is a curious lack of spiritual cohesion in the picture—the majority of the figures look away from the Saviour as well as from the bride, although the significance of the moment is such as to demand a concentration of everybody’s attention on the Christ. The picture, of which there are several replicas, notably one at the Stockholm Museum by David’s pupil Ambrosius Benson, was until 1580 in the Chapel of the Saint-Sang at Bruges, and then in the collection of Louis xiv., from which it passed into the Louvre.
The triptych (No. 2202a) of the Virgin and Child, with Two Angels, in the centre, and Two Donors presented by St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, on the wings, is officially catalogued as an anonymous picture of the Flemish sixteenth-century school, but is unquestionably an early work of Gerard David. It is interesting to note that the male Donor is the same as the Donor in the Marriage at Cana, though younger in years, and that the delightful and strangely Italian putti on the capitals of the columns that flank the Virgin’s throne recur again, reversed, in David’s Judgment of Cambyses, at Bruges. The Adam and Eve on the outside of the shutters are inspired by the corresponding figures on the great Van Eyck altarpiece at Ghent. The Louvre triptych was bought at the Garriga sale in Madrid, in 1890, for £248.