ART IT was in Bruges that the Van Eycks brought
to culmination the tradition that they had inherited, and founded as a result the Flemish school that was to dominate art north of the Alps for a hundred years. Of the painters of Bruges, Gerard David was the last great master, and, when he died there in 1523, it was a city of economic decline, overshadowed by the rising port of Antwerp. With his successors a century's achievement evaporated in second- hand virtuosity and affectation. This summer Bruges honoured David with an exhibition which has now been brought to Wilden- stein's under the auspices of the Arts Council (though not without Important omissions), where it may be seen until October 29th.
David is often represented as looking back to the Middle Ages, while Quentin Massys, his contemporary in Antwerp, is hailed as looking forward to the Renaissance. This, as Max Friedlander points out in a catalogue note, is not altogether just. More par- ticularly, David's development of landscape themes, and his placing of the human figure in a landscape setting, heralded a new age. The present exhibition, however, is perhaps not representative enough of his very best work to add any spectacular new knowledge to that conveyed by our own examples in the National Gallery— though, of course, it contains much of interest. It is sad that the Rouen Madonna could not be included.
David joined the Guild of St. Luke in Bruges in 1484. After the death of Memlinc (a superior artist) he was without rival, and became its dean in 15ot. His most impressive work dates from this period before his visit to Antwerp—from the last decade of the old century, that is to say, and the first of the new. Three such large paintings in this ekhibition are especially interesting. The two panels of the arrest and punishment of Sisamnes show many of David's limitations, and, most strikingly, his utter indifference to emotional values. Coldly, warily, inscrutably, his characters—. observed, as characters, with some exactitude—undertake the parts allotted them. They display, however gruesome their employment, as little interest or feeling as sleep-walkers. This calm austerity of David's is married more happily, in the great Baptism of Christ triptych, to his profound religious integrity. This is perhaps his masterpiece—thoughtfully composed, gravely poised about its ver- ticals, orderly, scrupulous, brilliant and refined in colour and execution, saved from suavity by complete conviction. Also in the exhibition are pictures by David's successors and pupils, Isenbrant and Ambrosius Benson.
Among the other exhibitions mention must be made of that at the Hanover Gallery, where F. E. McWilliam shows some of his curiously effective sculpture, and Pavel Tchelitchew, at his best one of the finest draughtsmen of the century, shows some hothouse draw- ings from the last ten years. Two younger painters of talent and promise are Ursula McCannell at Twenty Brook Street (when she does not slip into mere decoration) and Peter Lanyon at the Lefevre Gallery with his slim, cool, near-abstractions. M. H. MIDDLETON.
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