Brueghel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting

Flemish painting of the 16th century was admired for its meticulous technique and extraordinary realism. Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting presents some of the finest works created in the Southern (Spanish-ruled) Netherlands from the 15th to 17th centuries, including portraits, landscapes and religious works, from masters such as Hans Memling, Van Dyck, Rubens, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, his son Jan Brueghel, and Jan’s son-in-law, David Teniers the Younger.

Although by the mid-16th century the Netherlands enjoyed a level of wealth and sophistication that remained unmatched in the West for centuries, the Eighty Years War with Spain, from 1568 to 1648, all but destroyed the region’s infrastructure and creative industries. Most paintings in this exhibition were produced during this period of turbulence and its immediate aftermath when peace was restored.

Much of the greatest art is produced during periods of strife, the exhibition curators remind us. And from the moment you enter it is clear that great art is exactly what is here. The first gallery is crowded with it. The calm wise presence of Desiderius Erasmus, one of the greatest humanists of his age, painted in 1517 (see below) by Quinten Massys (1464/5-1530), an artist as celebrated as his sitter in the city of Antwerp, was alongside me before I’d barely closed the door. There he was, the scholar, sitting warmly clad in his study surrounded by books, concentrating on his writing.

Erasmus had commissioned the portrait as a gift for Sir Thomas More as a sign of friendship. It was sent to London along with another from his friend and fellow humanist, Peter Gillis, also painted by Massys. It was a “friendship diptych”, curator Jennifer Scott says. More was delighted with his gift. By amazing coincidence, the Gillis painting is also on show in London at the moment in the Renaissance Faces exhibition at the National Gallery.

Erasmus is a good starting point for the exhibition, Scott adds, for the Flemish painters were famous for their skill in painting a convincing likeness. And as if to prove this point there follow two works by Joos van Cleeve, a self-portrait and one of his wife, Katlijne. They make an interesting couple. What is going on here? For some reason they are spaced apart, a landscape hung between them. But maybe they need distance. He seems to look at her, his face firm, resolute, and is in the act of speaking, gesturing in emphasis. Perhaps he’s telling her off? She meanwhile sits calmly by, her hands at rest in her lap.

They are a compelling portrait pair: authority and receptivity, it would seem. And it is very skilful. The artist is almost showing off, the curators comment; foreshortened fingers like his are very difficult to do. And, it seems to me that van Cleeve makes his portrait sharper than hers: as though subtly to enhance his authority as an artist – as well as, perhaps, a husband. Flemish artists used a variety of visual devices to intensify the relationship between viewer and sitter. Such artifice also proclaimed virtuosity. Here, van Cleeve cleverly makes the shadows behind the sitters suggest they are in the same room, and to blur the boundaries between reality and illusion further, makes the picture frames appear to casts shadows.

Other examples of illusion appear in Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man where the subject appears to project into our space; Jan Gossaert’s use of a fictive inner frame in The Three Children of Christian II of Denmark to emphasise a family bond; and later, in the example of the Boy at a Window by an unidentified artist where the boy looks out at us, resting one hand on the window ledge, and taps the glass with the other. You have to be firm with yourself here, to keep looking at these deserving portraits and other works in this first room, when on the end wall, no more than a couple of feet away, is Pieter Brueghel’s powerful Massacre of the Innocents. This famous work, a deceptively beautiful scene of a Flemish village under snow, is now regarded as one of the most savage satires in the history of art.

I haven’t space to talk about it more. You’ll have to go and see for yourself, look for those smudges that tell the story of the lost innocents, replaced by animals and bundles, and look at the detail of those soldiers and villagers as Bruegel colourfully re-tells the King Herod story as a contemporary atrocity. And while you’re there, also enjoy the detail of other villagers having a frivolous time, in David Teniers’s A Kermis on St George’s Day or Jan Brueghel’s A Village Festival. Also, Rubens’s commanding self portrait painted for the future King Charles I to make up for a faux pas, or his portrait of his former workshop assistant, Van Dyck, and the three Rubens’ landscapes painted by the artist to hang in his home.

There’s a lot packed into this small show. You have until April 26 to enjoy it.

See: www.royalcollection.org.uk