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Updated: June 15, 2025
The above is found quoted in many books, in proof that oil painting was known long before the time of the Van Eycks; but all these old supposed oil paintings have been proved by chemical analysis to have been painted in distemper. See vol. ii., p. 141, of this work.
In the late Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's collection there is a picture by her, 'Two girls in a boat with a youth rowing, on wood, 'of very graceful motive and careful treatment. Roger van der Weyden was a contemporary of the Van Eycks, born at Tournai. His early pictures in Brussels are lost. He visited Italy in 1439, and was treated with distinction at Ferrara.
But Bruges is the natural frame for his exalted genius. If the Van Eycks were really the first to use oil-colour a fable, it is said Memling, who followed them, taught many great Italian painters the quality and expressiveness of beautiful paint. There is the portrait of Sybilla Sambetha, the serious girl with the lace veil. Did any of the later Dutch conjurers in paint attain such transparency?
This manuscript and one made for the Duke of Berry were among the finest ever painted so far as the pictures in them are concerned. The Count of Holland's book used to be in the library at Turin, where it was burnt a few years ago, so we can see it no more. But the fortunate ones who did see it thought that the pictures in it were actually painted by the Van Eycks when they were young.
It would seem as if skill and polish, with the amount of attention which they appropriate, with their elevation of manner over matter, and thence their lowered standard, are apt to rob from or blur in men these highest qualifications of genius, for it is true that judges miss even in the Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael of a later and much more accomplished generation, and, to a far greater extent, in the Rubens of another and still later day, the perfect simplicity, the unalloyed fervour, the purity of tenderness in Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and in their Flemish brethren, the Van Eycks and Mabuse.
The old Pre-Raphaelites aimed at absolute reproduction. They were succeeded by a race of men who saw all that their predecessors had seen, but also something higher. The Van Eycks and Memling paved the way for painters who found their highest representatives in Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt the mightiest of them all.
There one would meet members of the families of the old Dutch aristocracy, the Van Rensselaers, the Van Vechtens, the Schuylers, the Livingstons, the Bleeckers, the Brinkerhoffs, the Ten Eycks, the Millers, the Seymours, the Cochranes, the Biddles, the Barclays, the Wendells, and many others.
This painter, of whose genius there can be no question, is supposed to have been a pupil of the Van Eycks. Not much is known of him save that he painted at Bruges and Ghent and in 1476 entered a convent at Brussels where he was allowed to dine with distinguished strangers who came to see him and where he drank so much wine that his natural excitability turned to insanity.
Van Orley and Frans Floris were as sure of their advance upon the ancient Flemish painting of the Van Eycks and of Memling as Rubens himself must have been of his advance upon them. We can see plainly enough that in at least some of these cases the sense of progress was an illusion. There was movement, but it was not always forward movement.
Then the Van Eycks, Hubert and Jan, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling, Quentin Massys, Lucas van Leyden, the two Hans Holbein, elder and younger, Burgkmair, Wolgemut, and then, master of them all, Albrecht Dürer.
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