CONTEMPORARY ARTS
ART
Flemish Art. (Burlington House.) To start with, it is playing-card country. Then, as the figures take on more substance, the glimpses of daily life become more real as well. In the foreground sits the Madonna, oval-faced, modest, with down-cast eyes ; her hair, parted in the middle, falls about her shoulders • in the press of meticulous wild flowers kneel the unlovely donor and his wife. Beyond, in the distance, blue-slate-like mountains rear themselves abruptly into the sky ; a river winds round them to the horizon, two swans gliding with the current ; a row of windmills surmounts a gentle viridian eminence, castles and mountains ; shepherds tend their flocks, no bigger at this distance than so many white grubs upon a green leaf ; a wotnan on her way to market kneels by a wayside shrine ; a many-arched bridge, a • water-wheel, a troop of horsemen fords the river, a local dog prances with excitement ; high in the blue heavens a skein of lacy cloud drifts idly across the affairs of man and the wild geese fly towards the sun. And then there is nothing in the foreground and it is summer and the corn is being cut, or it is winter and the children are out in the snow with their sledges and the woodcutters are at work among the bare branches. And then it is kings and queens and emperors in armour and lace, and village festivals and tric-trac players in the tavern.
The exhibition of Flemish Art at Burling- ton House is really four or five exhibitions. There is a wonderful collection of some seventy manuscripts assembled by Dr. Pitcht, which covers a period of 250 years ; there is an exhibition of primitive and hybrid Gothic-Italianate painters ; tone of the bois- terous later petits mattres clustered round the towering figure of Pieter Breughel, who opened up for them the whole field of genre ; one-man shows by Rubens and Van Dyck, by the latter of whom nearly one hundred works are catalogued ; and in addition the architectural room contains a show of drawings, of which a number have been held over from the recent exhibition in the Diploma Gallery. Through all this work from 1300 to 1700 runs that strenuous pur- suit of superficial appearances which has so distinguished the Flemish vision (and which Michelangelo thought " suitable only for young women, monks and nuns, or those nobles without ear for true harmony ") combined with a sense of landscape which was, as Sir Kenneth Clark has said, to Flemish art what movement was to Florentine in extending our range of consciousness.
The Italians constructed from the inside out, by means of their knowledge of per- spective and anatomy ; the northern artists on an empirical basis from the outside in, by the acuteness of their observation of the surface texture of life, From the trompe l'oeil snails and, caterpillars, butterflies and rosebuds bordering a page in .a Book of Hours to a seventeenth-century fruit and flower piece is no jump at all ; from the tourney in Jacques de Guise's Chroniques de Hainaut or the view in, The Birth of Caesar through the door into a Netherlands street, to a Breughel Peasant Wedding or Winter Landscape scarcely greater. In these wonderful manuscripts, which repre-
sent the very beginning of northern art, are a multitude of rich and enchanting fancies of the utmost charm and delicacy—for diversity, consider Nos. 555 and 557, 560, 569 with its lovely bird, 576 and 585.
The first guild of painters, the Guild of St. Luke in Ghent, was founded in 1337 and by the end of the century nearly every city in Flanders had its own. The end of the middle ages could be said to be marked by the step from illumination to altar-picture which led to the technique of oil painting and by the collapse of the international style into local schools, which the new century brought. From, perhaps, 1425 to 1525 Flanders dominated all art in Northern Europe. Two superb altarpieces by Mem- ling from among a generous representation dominate the primitives at Burlington House. There are great works by Roger van der Weyden, Gerard David, and the melan- cholic Van der Goes whose Hippolyte de Berthoz and his wife almost foreshadows Gainsborough's Mr. and. Mrs. Robert Andrews in its treatment of the landscape. - Hearts will be lost to the " Master of the St. Ursula Legend," but Van Eyck 's thin- lipped wife, who risked her annuity in a municipal lottery in 1445 and whose portrait once served as an eel skinning board in the Bruges fish-market, must take central place here.
If Van Eyck is the archetypal giant of his period, and Rubens and Van Dyck similarly bestraddle theirs, so does Breughel, stretch- ing backwards and forwards in time; domin- ate the intervening period. The disappoint- ment of the Vienna pictures exhibition may be assuaged by the eleven examples here, which 'include the great hell-fire and dam- nation set-pieCe of Mad Meg traipsing through every horror of the collective unconscious with drawn sword and frying- pan ; two versions of The Fall of Icarus ; the Bird Trap ; the sonorous harmonies of the Flight into Egypt and the curious and ironic grisaille of the Death of the Virgin. How massive was Breughel's grasp of the unities, that he could combine Ovid with a German proverb (" No plough comes to a standstill because a man dies ") and gets away with it ; stage-manage the " Dulle Griet " without descending into the trivial ; consistently wrap up and conceal the ostensible subject-matter of his paintings while nevertheless illuminating that subject at the same time ; combine a humorous view of mankind—now ironic, now farcical —and a serious view of nature without any sense of strain. His human sympathies and visual objectivity and elemental energy make him impregnable.
So to Rubens and Van Dyck and their respective studios. Rubens is not seen at his best (many of his greatest achievements have gone to the exhibition at Rotterdam) but some very fine landscapes are included, notably a moonlight scene, The Prodigal Son, and the Landscape with Cattle from Munich. There is an unexpected and quite masterly painting of a lioness, and, since he always had an eye for a pretty woman, some fine portraiture. Van Dyck, given the whole of the large Gallery HI and most of Gallery VI, may be judged from examples of the dazzling early days in association with Rubens (The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian painted when he was 17, and St. Martin Dividing his Cloak painted at 21), but mainly by the work of his English period, shown here in great profusion. As one surveys so great a number of noble fops in armour and clear-complexioned ladies in silks, satins and lace, all of them as high-bred as bor- zois, there is a temptation to dismiss the never-failing elegance as mechanical, a trick with " an idle hand, a lady's wrist, a long finger adorned with a ring." (The clement of flattery in Van Dyck may be gauged by comparing his portraits of Thomas Howard with those by Rubens.) The wheat is here as well though, in paint- ings like the triple head of Charles I, made for the Lisa of Bernini, and the double portrait (though Van Dyck was usually less successful with more than one figure) of Thomas Killigrew and (possibly) Thomas
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