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IN THE NETHERLANDS.
costly furniture, besides courtly manners, to captivate the eye and
engage the attention of the painter. Undoubted, however, as the
effect of such influences was in giving a particular direction to
painting in the Netherlands, they assuredly were not the source
from which it sprang. It was not until the painter's art was eman-
cipated from the trammels of a traditional practice that it found
favour at court and in the trading towns.
Up to the beginning of the 15th century art was in neither a
better nor worse condition than in adjacent lands, though the
painters of Cologne could undoubtedly claim pre-eminence. Such
specimens of wall-painting in the Low Countries as are still pre-
served from the 12-14th centuries show an entire want of profes-
sional training. The works of the miniature-painters, however, rank
higher. Encouraged by commissions from French princes, they
were elaborately finished, and both in colour and drawing give
evidence of a higher education in the artists. Sculpture, too, could
boast of sterling work. If any general inference is to be drawn from
monumental effigies preserved in Tournai, and dating from the
beginning of the 15th century, a school of sculpture existed there,
which successfully aimed at a truthful rendering of nature. The
practice of painting works of sculpture brought the sister arts into
more intimate relation. So far, however, was sculpture in advance,
that painters found themselves reduced to the expedient of adopting
the plastic mode of treatment in the disposal of groups, as well as
in drawing and the treatment of drapery. A long interval elapsed
ere painting acquired a style of its own, and until every trace of the
plastic relief had disappeared. Such was the condition of the paint-
s art in the Netherlands, when the two brothers Van Hyck made
se, but we are not in a position to indicate their im-
ite predecessors, nor to determine with certainty the circum-
stances of their early training.
The two brothers Van Eyck were natives of Maeseyck, near
Maastricht, where Hubert, the elder, was born probably about
the year 1370. Wolfram yon Eschenbach, in his ‘Parzival’, had
already pronounced the painters of Maastricht and Cologne to be
the best of his time, but how painting at Maastricht or Limburg
was employed in Hubert’s time we know not. Absolutely nothing
is known of the course of Hubert’s early training, of his school, or
early works. About the year 1420 we find him settled at Ghent,
where a guild of painters had already long existed, along with his
brother Jan (born between 1384 and 1385), Whether while here
he was the teacher or the taught, whether the local influences of
Ghent first modified his conceptions and method, or whether the
guild in Ghent derived new light from him, cannot be determined,
We know of only one work from Hubert van EByck’s hand, indis-
putably identified as his, and it was painted in the concluding
years of his life. This is the gigantic altar-piece which Jodocus |