The Story of Bruges

by Ernest Gilliat-Smith

But this was not all; even the very stonework at Bruges, and this was no doubt also the case in other Flemish cities, glowed with gold and colour; sculpture, statuary, tracery, the mouldings of doors and arches and windows were not unfrequently thus embellished; we have seen Van Eyck and other artists engaged in illuminating the niches and the carved figures on the façade of the Hôtel de Ville; there is an ancient picture of the interior of Notre Dame which represents the capitals of the nave radiant with gold and vermilion; vestiges of polychromy within and without, on woodwork, on plaster, on iron, on stone, have been discovered all over the city. It is no exaggeration to say that Bruges at the opening of the fourteen hundreds, the richest, the mightiest and the loveliest city of Northern Europe, was at this time steeped in harmonious tints. She had already entered upon the autumn of her existence, but, like Nature, she had arrayed herself in a vesture of gold wrought about with divers colours, and the cunning workers who had woven and embroidered it—the painters of frescoes and the stainers of glass, the illuminators of vellum and the illuminators of stone—were the precursors and fathers and founders of the most glorious school of painting which the world has yet produced. The Van Eycks, the Memlincs, the Van der Weydens, all the Flemish primitives, whose marvellous pictures still fill us with admiration, lived and moved and had their being in the beauty which these men created. The statues, the miniatures, the mural painting of these poor craftsmen were the models which inspired their first work, and there is reason to believe that the insatiate thirst for colour which their predecessors had experienced led indirectly to the famous discovery which rendered its execution possible.

In a country like the Netherlands, devoid of precious marbles, there was only one way of satisfying it—to find some artificial means of colouring the material at hand, and in that damp, changeable climate the pigment applied must needs be of a nature to withstand the vagaries of weather.

The monk Theophilus, a writer often quoted in the twelfth century, gives exact formulæ for mingling colour and oil, but the pigment thus obtained was far from being satisfactory; a second coat could not be applied until the first was completely dry, and the length of time which it took in drying rendered it practically useless, at all events for the painting of pictures.

For centuries artists all over Europe were vainly endeavouring to remedy this defect, and it was not until the opening of the fourteen hundreds that the problem was at last solved, but long before that period oil paint had been successfully employed for decorative purposes. We know that the sculptor Wuillaume du Gardin made use of it for his statues as early as 1341, and when Hubert van Eyck first came to Bruges at the close of the fourteenth or at the opening of the fifteenth century the practice seems to have been generally adopted. It has long been known that John van Eyck was an enlumineur des statues, and a document recently discovered in the archives of Ghent makes it quite certain that his elder brother Hubert followed the same calling; what more likely then, than that the idea should have struck him of painting his pictures with the same pigment with which he had been in the habit of decorating stone? But whatever may have led to his great discovery, certain it is, that the day on which he made it was the birthday of modern art.

The invention of oil painting has until recently been generally assigned to the year 1420 or thereabouts, but if Mr. Weale is right in his calculations, and be it borne in mind he has devoted a lifetime to the study of the Flemish primitives, and has done more to elucidate their history than any living man, Hubert van Eyck’s great oil-painting, the only picture which can as yet be certainly assigned to him, ‘The Adoration of the Lamb,’ at Ghent, cannot have been commenced later than 1415, probably even earlier. It follows then that the new process must have been invented prior to that date.

Hubert van Eyck

Hubert van Eyck, the first and the greatest of the Flemish masters, was born at the little market town of Maeseyck in Limbourg, somewhere about the year 1366. He seems to have been of an old painter family, as not only Hubert himself but his brothers John and Lambert and his sister Marguerite all followed this calling. Of his life’s story we know little, of his early years hardly anything. An illuminator of missals and an illuminator of statues, as well as a painter of pictures, perhaps, as Mr. Weale has recently suggested, he made his first studies at Maestricht or at Cologne and afterwards travelled in Spain and in Italy. By the opening of the fifteenth century he must certainly have been an artist of some reputation, for in 1413 John de Visch, Lord of Axel and Capelle, bequeathed to his daughter Mary, who was later on Abbess of Bourbourg near Gravelines, a picture which Hubert had painted. What was its subject or what has become of it is not known.[45]

He seems to have passed his middle life at Bruges,[46] and there are still in existence two pictures attributed with reason to him, which must have been painted during his sojourn there. The first represents Our Lady, St. Anne and Herman Steenken, who was Vicar of the Chartreuse of St. Anne at Woestine near Bruges, from 1402 to 1404, and from 1406 till his death on April 23, 1428. This picture is at present in the possession of Baron Rothschild at Paris; the second is now in the Berlin Gallery; it depicts the same monk, but apparently some ten years older, Our Lady and St. Barbara.

The last years of Hubert’s life were spent at Ghent. In the year 1424 we find him receiving from the aldermen of that city 6s. gr. for the sketches of two pictures which they had commissioned him to paint for them but were apparently never executed. Perhaps he had not leisure to do so. About this time Hubert must have been fully occupied. He had a triptych in hand which Robert Poortier had ordered for a chapel in honour of St. Anthony, which he had founded in the Church of St. Sauveur, at Ghent, and a statue of the same saint to gild and colour, also for Robert Poortier. For years he had been at work on ‘The Adoration of the Lamb,’ and we know that he had not completed it when death struck him down on the 18th of September 1426.