The Invention Of Oil Painting

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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If little is known about the Van Eycks, still less is known concerning their successors. Patient research among municipal records in Flanders, however, has greatly increased our knowledge during recent years. Twenty years ago the very name of the painter of a fine altar-piece in the Abbey of Flemalle, near Liege, was uncertain; he was alluded to vaguely as ‘The Master of Flemalle’. Today it has been established that he was a painter of Tournai, called Robert Campin, who was born about 1375 and lived till 1444. There are two good examples of his art in the National Gallery, and he is important, not only for his own work, but as being the master of Roger van der Weyden.

Among the religious painters Roger van der Weyden (c.1400-64), who was born at Tournai and settled in Brussels, had a considerable influence. Beside the calm solemnity of Hubert van Eyck, his pictures appear exaggerated in their dramatic intensity and fervor. He was essentially a tragic artist, dwelling on the sufferings of the Savior and peopling his pictures with wailing figures, whose emaciated faces stream with tears, whose hands are convulsively clutched in agony or outstretched to heaven. In 1450 he visited Rome and is thought to have had some influence on Ferrarese imbibed something of a new spirit, for towards the end of his life his sentiment became more gentle and refined. Van der Weyden is seen at his best in ‘The Bewailing of the Body of Christ’ in the Berlin Gallery, and in this picture his affinity with the school of Van Eyck is shown in the delicate and gently detailed landscape background.

Roger’s fellow pupil Jacques Daret, who died in 1466, is softer and more conciliatory in his religious themes, and his paintings are peculiarly sweet both in color and temper.

The tragic painting of Van der Weyden was continued by Hugo van der Goes (c.1435-82) of Ghent and Bruges, who is reputed to have begun life as a wild pleasure-lover. Suddenly he withdrew to a monastery near Brussels, and conscious-stricken at his own dissipation he henceforward devoted his talent to sacred subjects, usually accentuating the sorrows of Christ, but always avoiding the wailing and excessive gesticulation which marked the pictures of Van der Weyden. His art is deeper and more quiet, but is certainly not less expressive. The alter-piece with ‘The Adoration of Jesus’ which, under the orders of Portinari, agent for the Medici in Bruges, he painted for Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, is generally accepted as the supreme masterpiece of Hugo van der Goes. We see the continuation of the Van Eyck tradition in the glimpse of landscape, in which light-green branches are boldly contrasted with the deep-blue sky, in the naturalism of the fire-red lily in the foreground, and in the realism of the rough, weatherbeaten shepherds who on one side balance the sturdy figure of St Joseph, who stands praying, on the other. When this picture arrived in Florence, it created a great sensation, and it has been thought that many famous Italian artists, among them Pierro di Cosimo, Ghirlandaio, Piero Pollaiuolo, were influenced to the extent of changing their style after they had seen this masterpiece by Hugo van der Goes.