Rogier van der Weyden and James Ensor: Line and Its Deformation

The grand and bombastic building on the Leopold de Waelplaats in Antwerp that has housed the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Royal Museum of Fine Arts) since 1890 closed on October 3, 2010, for a major interior reconstruction that is not expected to be completed before 2017. During this reconstruction, some of the museum’s better known nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings have been exhibited as far from Antwerp as Japan; some of its rare fifteenth-century panel paintings were exhibited last year in the beautifully preserved sixteenth-century Rockox House, just a twenty-minute walk from the museum.

There is something to be said for seeing nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings and fifteenth-century paintings in separate and respectively congenial settings, but the 1890 building did more than provide wall space for paintings that had little in common with its architectural ethos and belonged to separate and sometimes antagonistic cultural worlds. The museum went beyond exhibiting individual paintings, even individual styles of painting; it exhibited antagonistic concepts of painting.

When it was inaugurated in 1810, the museum absorbed what had been the collection of the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. In 1841 that collection was supplemented by a bequest from one of the earliest and greatest collectors of Early Netherlandish painting, Florent van Ertborn, a former mayor of Antwerp. In the 1920s, it began to collect contemporary painters, notably James Ensor.

Van Ertborn’s collection was assembled at a time when the Early Netherlandish masters were out of fashion, their work unknown to all but a tiny public. Panels from what is now one of the most famous European paintings of the late middle ages, the Ghent Altarpiece (1432), were kept out of sight by nineteenth-century bishops of Ghent, who were scandalized by the life-size nude representations of Adam and Eve.

When I first went to Antwerp, it was expressly to see paintings that were part of the van Ertborn bequest, although I knew nothing about the bequest at the time and had never heard of Florent van Ertborn. I had fallen in love with the Early Netherlandish paintings I had seen in American museums and in printed images illustrating books on the subject. I knew very little of the history of the painters’ reputation. It seemed so evident to me that Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden were among the greatest of European painters that I would have found it difficult to believe when I first encountered their work that they could have gone through a long period of obscurity and neglect. I was not aware that in the first years of the nineteenth century Friedrich Schlegel had had a similar experience; the German philosopher and poet was dazzled by the paintings and amazed that they had been practically unknown for roughly two centuries, until some of them were exhibited in the new Musée Napoléon in Paris, where he saw them—booty looted by the French army from sites in the southern Netherlands that are now part of the Kingdom of Belgium.

For students of Early Netherlandish painting, the highlights of the van Ertborn collection are two small panels by Jan van Eyck—the Madonna of the Fountain (1439) and Saint Barbara (1437), an exquisite uncolored underpainting that looks like a drawing, both in their original frames—and two paintings by Rogier van der Weyden—a portrait of Philip de Croy, half of a diptych whose other half now hangs in the Picture Gallery of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and an altarpiece known as The Seven Sacraments, a classic exemplar of fifteenth-century Christian iconography and a virtuoso specimen of the fifteenth-century art of painting as, fundamentally, colored drawing. These are the paintings that brought me to Antwerp.

Since my initial visits to the Antwerp museum were focused on the van Ertborn bequest and especially on Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments, I was unaware that a major collection of the works of James Ensor (1860–1949) was to be found just one floor below. I...