Ye distant spires, ye antique towers
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade.
943. A PORTRAIT.
Unknown (Early Flemish: 15th century).
See also (p. xx)
This portrait, which is dated 1462, was formerly supposed to be Memlinc's portrait of himself, in the costume of the Hospital of St. John at Bruges, but is now called by others Bouts's own portrait. "It is," says Sir W. Armstrong (Notes on the National Gallery, p. 28), "pretty surely the work of Dirck Bouts. Compare it with the Madonna numbered 774, and ascribed to Van der Goes. In conception, in chord of colour, in technical manner, the similarity is so complete between them as to leave room, in my mind, for very little doubt as to the identity of their authors. And this Madonna is by Dirck Bouts, as no one who has examined his 'Last Supper' in the Church of St. Pierre at Louvain can doubt.... Sir Martin Conway, who was the first, I fancy, to recognise Bouts in all three of these pictures, drew my attention to a curious peculiarity of his: he goes out of his way to paint hands. In his 'Last Supper' many hands are displayed that might quite naturally have been hidden, and we find the same thing in this portrait." Whether of Memlinc or of Bouts, the face bespeaks a gentle, humble, pious, laborious soul. The painting of the hair is especially remarkable. It is touched with the utmost minuteness, and yet the silky, flowing texture is conveyed with the utmost freedom. This picture was formerly in the possession of Samuel Rogers.
944. TWO USURERS.
Marinus van Romerswael (Flemish: about 1497-1573).
Marinus of Romerswael (his birthplace), also called "de Zeeuw" (the Zeelander), was fond of this subject, the composition of which he seems to have borrowed from Quentin Metsys, by whom also similar pictures are common. In early life Marinus was apprenticed to a glass-painter at Antwerp. Nothing is known of his later life till towards its close, when he was residing at Middelburg. "There, in 1566, in an iconoclastic outburst of the populace, the churches of the town were wrecked; and Marinus was accused before the tribunals of taking part in the spoliation of the Westmonsterkerk. Being held guilty, he was condemned on the 25th of June 1567 to perform an ignominious public penance and to be banished from Middelburg for the space of six years. An aged man then, he can scarcely have survived his term of exile" (see authorities cited in the Official Catalogue).
One inserts items in a ledger; the other puzzles over the particulars of some business transaction. It is a powerful realisation of what Ruskin calls the New Beatitude, "Blessed are the merciless, for they shall obtain money." "The picture is remarkable," says Sir Edward Poynter, "not only for its marvellous finish, and the energy of the expressions, but for its luminous quality and the purity of the colour."