International studio (34.1908)

The Real Van Eycks

City. Here again one turns away from humanity
to the landscape through which the multitude move;
lovingly imagined by these two early fifteenth cen-
tury men born in the Low Countries, who looked at
Nature and loved vast distances and near flowers,
particularizing each, sure that the form of petal and
stamen and blossom were as important as the linea-
ments of saints and the anguish marks of martyrs.
It seems quite appropriate that I should be read-
ing this book, the first really authentic account of
the brothers Van Eyck by a window on the eighth
floor of an apartment house in New York. For I
can see such a panorama as these brothers loved to
float with microscopic exactitude upon their pic-
tures. John would have enjoyed throwing the great
spans of Brooklyn Bridge, which I can see from my
window, across one of his horizons, and he would
not have been frightened to suggest the swarming
life that passes to and fro on the approaches to
Brooklyn Bridge, for did he not put 2000 people,
small as gnats, into the two towns connected by the
seven-arched bridge that you see from the terrace
by the rose garden in his picture of Our Lady and
Child and Chancellor Rolin ?
There are other reasons why I feel friendly to-
ward John Van Eyck: one is that he had seen
morsels of England—glimpses of our Plymouth and
Falmouth. To be sure it was in 1428, before Fal-
mouth became “ a fine town with ships in the bay.”
He saw Falmouth and Plymouth during one of the
many missions that he undertook for his patron,
Duke Philip of Burgundy. Starting from Sluus on
October 19, 1428, he was obliged to harbor through
stress of weather at Falmouth from October 25 to
December 2, but as two centuries later there was
but one house on the site of the present town, Fal-
mouth must have looked to John Van Eyck’s eyes
as green and virginal as this island of Manhattan
to the eager gaze of Henry Hudson when, in 1609,
he sailed past these shores searching for a water-
passage across the continent.
That John Van Eyck saw Falmouth is certain;
also that he and Hubert were great masters of paint-
ing, pioneers of that solemn fifteenth century which,
like a lodestar, draws all those whose temperament
urges them to escape from the present into the com-
forting past; but that the Van Eycks are the Van
Eycks of the legends originated by Vasari, and am-
plified by other pleasant gossips who prefer the pic-
turesque hand-to-mouth stories to dry and dusty
documents—ah! Mr. Weale makes an end of all
that.
His book is a model to all future scientific art-
historians ; it is a volume indispensable to all who

concern themselves with connoisseurship or the his-
tory of art. Here is a compilation from which fancy
is wholly barred out; nothing but absolute facts are
admitted to these stern pages. Like Huxley, who
neither affirmed or denied the existence of a Deity,
but contented himself with saying vigorously that
he had seen no proofs either way, Mr. Weale admits
nothing to his skeleton life of the Van Eycks which
is not contained in the documents. And what are
the documents? Merely and mainly the account
books kept by their employers, the chief of whom
was Philip III, Duke of Burgundy. John entered
his service in 1425 as “varlet de chambre” and
court painter, and remained in it honored and es-
teemed until his death in 1441. Documents also
exist three years anterior to 1425, so the bald facts
of the life of John are known for 19 years.
Hubert remains mysterious and shadowy. All
we gather for certain about him is that he had set-
tled in Ghent before 1425, and that he lived there
until his death in 1426. Mr. Weale extinguishes
such pleasant flames of unreliability as the informa-
tion contained in the ode of the poet-painter Lucas
de Heere in praise of the Ghent polyptych, which
we are told is the original source of the apocryphal
Eyckian legends.
So much has been destroyed under the spray of
Mr. Weale’s legend-germ destroyer that one loses
count of the active life of the departed germs in ad-
miration of the method of destruction. Let me
make a brief examination of that method, for, as I
have said, this is a book that may well stand as a
model for future compilers of documentary biog-
raphies, compact of learning, accuracy and re-
search. Writers, half-poet, half-historian, such as
Pater, gifted with the intuitive imagination need no
model. They are guided by sympathy, wonder,
and their delight in the vision they evoke.
Here, tabulated, is the scaffolding of Mr.Weale’s
edifice. It is as unemotional as Brooklyn Bridge:
1. A modest Foreword . . . 4 pages
2. A Chronology of hard facts 4 pages
3. Documents in Chronological
Order printed in the lan-
guage of their composition,
with brief English para-
phrases .25 pages
4. Bibliography from 1430 to
1907, with critical comments
on the works cited. Some
of the Ecykian historians are
ruthlessly castigated. Hard-
ly one escapes unwhipped.
The following on M. Mi-

XXVI