Flemish Artists of the Valois Courts by Ruth Massey Tovell (review)

SHORTER NOTICES 209 interested Locke; and, finally, Bolingbroke's great associate Harley as patron of English medieval learning. K ENNETH MACLEAN Flemish Artists of the Valois COlLrts. By RUTH MASSEY TOVELL. Toronto: 'University of Toronto Press. 1950. Pp. xviii, 157. Eleven colour plates, 49 black and white illustrations. $11.00. This handsome large volume, in an edition of 550 copies, is well laid out, excellently printed, satisfactorily supplied with appendices, notes, a good bibliography and index, and- most notably-beautifully illustrated with no less than eleven plates in rich colour, from the illuminated manuscript Les Tres Belles HelLres de Bruxelles of the early sixteenth century, and 49 black and white reproductions ranging from illuminated pages from the late thirteenth century up to a panel painting from the year 1436 by the Flemish artist Jan van Eyck. The broad scope of the subject, which traces outstanding developments in the work of Flemish artists at the court centres of Paris, Dijon, Bruges, etc., within the period indicated by the illustrations, and the necessity of making a personal selection among the mass of material available, cause the modest author at the outset of her journey to listen and long for "the friendly tread of the angels." Her aim is to convey to others some of the interest and satisfaction experienced by her late husband and herself during years of exploring and enjoying treasures of the past, of collecting information, collating, and consulting. One senses the sincere and unpretentious lover of art at work here, who searches and selects independently, whose warm enthusiasm recreates living experience, and whose aim is not merely to accumulate complete historical data. In the nine chapters of the text, Mrs. Tovell establishes first the general background of medieval Flanders-the happy combination of prosperous towns, trading centres for the entire world, with a resplendent , art-loving aristocracy, and a rising, immensely wealthy bourgeoisie -a suitable setting for brilliant creative accomplishments. We see Bruges, one of the most advanced cities of fourteenth-century Europe, with its paved streets, traffic jams at business hours, twenty foreign consulates, high esteem for noted artists, and the rivalry with its neighbour Ghent- a point on which the climax of the book is built. The influence and achievements of the gilds can be seen in the stately procession of workers in gold, enamel, and ivory, the illuminators , sculptors, and painters. There is a most enjoyable section on the scriptoria and on the collections of precious illuminated manu- 210 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY scripts that formed the basis of Europe's great libraries. Famous names come to life from the royal House of Valois with its Kings of France and Dukes of Burgundy, its Goods and Bolds who made such advantageous matches with Flanders and elsewhere, and, above all, its Duke John of Berry with his seventeen glorious chateaux and his 300 treasured manuscripts, of which 88 are still in existence. From them come most of the illustrations in the present book, including the colour plates from the "Brussels Hours." The text deals in good detail with each illustration, tracing the gradual freeing of Flemish art from Italian and French influences, and showing how the fusion of increasingly independent elements, particularly in illumination and sculpture, favoured the rise of a genius of the magnitude of Jan van Eyck, court painter to Duke Philip the Good, at Bruges, from 1425 to his death in 144l. In the final chapters, devoted to the great van Eyck altarpiece at Ghent and to a brief appraisal of the evolution of Jan's style, Mrs. Tovell marches boldly into the midst of one of the most fascinating and fantastic problems in the history of art-the problem of whether the marvellous galaxy of van Eyck works should be ascribed to the hand of one artist or of two-in other words, whether there was, or was not, a painter Hubert van Eyck, elder brother of Jan. Julius S. Held, who reviewed this hook for Canadian Art, feared that Mrs. Tovell's rather full inclusion of the "Renders thesis," demolishing Hubert as "personnage de h'gende," might prove of little interest to the "general" public. It has absorbed 'all the readers...