JULES HELBIG. LA PEINTURE AU PAYS DE LLIÉGE ET SUR LES BORDS DE LA MEUSE. xiv and 510 pp., 30 phototypes, and numerous cuts. Liége, 1903. 12 by 8½ inches. 15s.
This, the second and much enlarged edition of a volume published thirty years ago and long out of print, contains the fruits of the author’s researches, not only at Liége and in the Mosan towns, but also in many museums and private collections. ¶ In the first fifty pages he has brought together all the documentary evidence as to the introduction and progress of art in the principality, illustrating the same by reproductions of the paintings on the mutilated shrine of Saint Odilia at Kerniel, of miniatures from manuscripts in the British Museum, the Royal Library at Brussels, etc., and of the exquisite storied embroideries on the antependium from the church of Saint Martin at Liége, now in the Industrial Art Museum at Brussels. In the next three chapters the author treats of the Benedictine artists of Liége, of the Mosan contemporaries of the Van Eycks, and of the paintings executed in the fifteenth century, of which so little has escaped destruction. As to the painters who flourished in the sixteenth century there is fuller information, though there yet remains much to be done before the history of Joachim Patenir and Henry Bles can be cleared up and their works classified. Of Lambert Lombard and his pupils and followers the author gives us a full account, and from their time onwards to the end of the eighteenth century this volume contains a thoroughly complete history of the painters who flourished in the district and of the paintings they executed. We congratulate the author on the termination of this work, which, with the volume on sculpture and the plastic arts published by him in 1890, constitutes a very satisfactory and well-illustrated history of art in the principality of Liége.
W. H. J. W.