According to a legend long current in the city, Memlinc was a poor soldier who, having escaped with his life from the battlefield of Nancy (January 4, 1477), somehow or other succeeded in making his way to Bruges, sought shelter in the Hospital of St. John, and was there healed of his wounds. Having no money wherewith to requite the brethren for the kindness they had shown him, he painted them a picture, or rather a whole series of pictures—the famous Shrine of St. Ursula.
There is no documentary evidence in support of this story. The first writer to mention it is the Abbé Jean Baptiste Descamps in his Vie des peintres Flamands, which appeared in 1733, some two hundred and forty years after Memlinc’s death, and since Mr. Weale’s discoveries in 1861 it has been generally and perhaps too lightly regarded as devoid of all foundation.
The documents which have of late years been brought to light do not, however, touch the main outlines of the hospital story, though they certainly prove that some of the incidents could not have taken place as the Abbé Descamps relates them.
Perhaps, as Mr. Weale suggests, Memlinc learned the first elements of his art at Cologne. There is a tradition that he was at one time the pupil of Van der Weyden. May be he first conceived his love of that delicate, miniature-like style which he afterwards brought to such perfection from ‘Master Simon Marmion of Valenciennes, who,’ Louis de la Fontaine tells us, ‘had such skill in the noble science of painting that he surpassed not only all the other artists resident in the said town, but likewise those of all the neighbouring cities,’ that ‘prince of illuminators,’ whom Jean Lemain, the poet-secretary of Marguerite of Austria, in his Couronne Margaritique enumerates among the most famous painters of his day.
‘Et Marmion, prince d’enlumineure
Dont le nom croit comme paste en levain
Par les effets de son noble tournure.’
We know that a young Brussels painter, whose Christian name was Hans, was sojourning at Valenciennes from 1454 to 1458,[49] and this same Hans seems later on to have returned to Brussels and entered the service of Roger van der Weyden.
Of course Hans was a sufficiently ordinary name in Germany, but it was not a common one in the Netherlands, and there is another circumstance which makes it probable that the Hans in question was Hans Memlinc.
No picture of Marmion has come down to us which can be identified as certainly his, but there are several which may be his handiwork. Amongst them four panels on which is depicted the life of St. Bertin. They once formed the wings of the sculptured retable of silver gilt, adorned with enamel and precious stones, which for more than three hundred years glistered behind the high altar in the Abbey Church of St. Bertin at St. Omer, the last resting-place of so many of the early Counts of Flanders.
Exquisite alike in colour and design, in days when Gothic art was least esteemed these marvellous paintings excited universal admiration, and Rubens himself is said to have been so enamoured of their beauty that he offered to cover them with Louis d’or if only the monks would consent to sell.
Presently came the evil days of the French Revolution. The old church was pillaged and razed to the ground, and the triptych disappeared. Fortunately the shutters were saved. Somehow or other they came into the hands of a baker of St. Omer, who later on sold them to an art collector in the neighbourhood. In 1823 they were put up for sale at the Hôtel Bullion in Paris and purchased for 7500 francs (£300) by Monsieur Nieuwenhuys for William I., King of the Netherlands. Only the larger shutters, however, were placed in the King’s collection. The smaller ones were re-sold to M. Beaucousin, and when he died in 1861 they were purchased along with his other pictures for the National Gallery.