Imported Images: Netherlandish Late Gothic Sculpture in England c. 1400–c. 1550 (review)

This long-awaited study, based in part on the author's PhD dissertation at the University of London, represents a welcome and important addition to the scholarly literature on late-Gothic Netherlandish sculpture (in spite of the title, it also includes a small number of German works). The first chapter of the book summarizes the present state of research about the varied centers of production, techniques, and materials. Far more important are the subsequent two chapters, which present the surprisingly rich written documentation of works imported into England. Of the numerous references to works cited during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gathered together here for the first time (chapter 2), none are known to have survived (although an important statue of the Madonna [figure 42], apparently of Bruges origin and once held in Aberdeen, Scotland, eventually made its way to Brussels).

Chapter 3 concerns itself with a second wave of importation, during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, when works of art were systematically removed from churches and sold, many to English antique dealers. This was an impressive harvest: we are told, for instance, that in the years 1809–12, as many as eighteen ships carrying works of art left the Belgian port of Oostende for England. The collection of Oscott College, gathered by the neo-Gothic architect Augustus Welby Pugin, who used these works in his teaching, remains one of the most important collections of Netherlandish sculpture, in spite of the fact that the gem of the collection, a superb brass lectern from the church of St. Peter in Leuven, was sold to the Cloisters in New York in 1968. It still includes the single most elaborately carved Netherlandish Gothic pulpit extant, known to have once graced the church of St. Gertrude in the same city.

For the art historian, the cache of heretofore mostly unknown sculptures discussed by Woods in the catalog, which makes up the remaining two-thirds of the book, represents an exceptionally rich bonanza. Included are some nineteen original or reconstituted carved altarpieces, approximately fifty altarpiece fragments; a pulpit; fifteen images of the Virgin, including Madonna and Pietà groups; seven statues of Christ, principally Calvary figures; and thirty statues of various saints, including generational groups of St. Anne. All are critically discussed and provided with a reasoned attribution and pertinent literature.

In regard to no. 22, this Entombment of Christ is convincingly localized to the Picard region of northern France, which has become increasingly familiar to scholars in recent years. In view of the present state of research, the group can safely be attributed to an atelier active in Beauvais, where comparable head types can be seen in the Musée Départementale de l'Oise (stone head of Christ, wooden beam ends). Directly comparable works from the same shop include a group in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin as well as an especially fine Entombment that appeared on the London Art Market in 2008 (Daniel Katz).

In regard to no. 23, Woods rightly attributes this Adoration of the Shepherds fragment to a Brussels sculptor, but there is good reason to think that although he was certainly trained in the Brabantine capital, this master (perhaps identifiable with Michel Boen, cited in documents there) was established in the Hainaut—probably in the city of Mons, judging by the geographic distribution of his works in the central and southern parts of this county (see the retables in Ste. Waudru, Mons and in La Flamengrie, dep. Aisne, formerly in the abbey of Liessies). Other works from this atelier include a fragment of a kneeling St. Joseph and Shepherd in Ipswich (no. 70 in the catalog) and, importantly, the retable of the Life of the Virgin in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In regard to no. 63 (a St. Christopher statuette, along with a close counterpart in Lund, Sweden), are considered to be of German origin...