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

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JEAN PROVOST. 58 THE VIRGIN AND CHILD, IN A
58 Oak panel: 32,5 centimeters high hy 23,5 centimeters wide. 58

HARDLY twenty years have elapsed since the preceding
panel was painted, but already with Jean Provost we
enter into a very different world. We leave behind
us the traditions of Bruges in the 15th. century and find an
artist, born in Mons, having passed through Antwerp, and
who, in the old city of the Van Eycks, the Christus and
the Mendings, is to be one of the promoters of new ideas
wholly impregnated with humanism and culture. :-t-r—~
58 In this respect our Virgin is most characteristic, for she
clearly shows the influence of Josse van Cleve (the Master
of the Death of the Virgin), whose studio in Antwerp was,
as we know, so strongly dominated by the Italian models and
especially by the School of da Vinci. Our painting is at the
present time, we believe, one of the only productions by
Provost in which Mr. Hulin de Loo (who already in 1902, in
a masterly study, had reconstituted the works of this painter)
has been able to trace such evident signs of inspiration bon
rowed from the Master of the Death of the Virgin, r--1 1--
58 To Josse van Cleve are due the expression, the pose of
the head, and especially that peculiar attempt at a smile;