Hulin de Loo, Georges: Early Flemish paintings in the Renders Collection at Bruges: exhibited at the Belgian Exhibition, Burlington House, January 1927 (London, 1927)

repainted and showed few traces of the quality or condition of
the original work hidden under the surface. Even for those
who follow art sales and visit regularly the principal European
dealers, the pictures collected here will afford surprises. Nearly
all of them are personal finds and emerge now for the first
time from their obscurity : Mr. Renders seems to possess for
pictures something like the rod of the spring - finder, r——t-
36 Who would have thought it possible to find, dormant in
the stillness of a Belgian home, a typical work of that ancestor
of Rhenish painting, whose mysterious personality is hidden
beneath the conventional label : «Meister Wilhelm »?
Even more unexpected is the Crucifixion painted in the
Sienese manner by one of the painters (French ? Franco -
Flemish ?) attached to the court of the Duke of Berry, as is
shown by the armorial bearings of that prince on the binding
of the Gospel held by St. John. Hitherto it has been only
by book illuminations (as, for instance, in the Book of Hours
of the Duke of Berry at Brussels) that we could appreciate
the extent to which our artists were Italianized in the first
years of the XVth century. The benedictine « Christ de
P i t i e », a Flemish painting of the second quarter of the XVth
century, remains a problem for every art student. Must I point
out also the lovely Madonna of Jean Gros by Rogier
Van der Weyden? This picture comes in fact from a not
altogether unknown Bruges collection, but it had escaped general