The work is finished, and then exhibited to the spec tators, who are asked their opinion : "Que t'en semble t'il Adrien Mangot de Tours Et toi Romain, Christofle Hiéremie, Porta onc roy tel richesse aux estours Et toy, petit Antoine de Bordeaux, Approche toy, orfèvre du duc Charles, D'architecture et de peinture ensemble, Que ton engin haut qu'humain ressemble." The Margaritic Crown is a strange confusion of names, dates, and places; but the rhymes are curious, because they show the interest still taken in the sixteenth century in the artists of the fifteenth, and because they are the work of a Frenchman. Nor are these the only examples of the Flemish painters being made the theme of poetry. In another place, Lemaire mentions them as follows in the legend of the Venetians, which he wrote in 1509. "J'ay pinceaux mille, et brosses et ostilz; Dont le nom bruit par mémoires anciennes, J'ay des espritz récentz et nouvelletz, Ou que Foucquet, qui tant en gloires siennes Foucquet, whom Lemaire thus notices, is one of the first French painters who formed his manner in Flanders. Charles the Sixth and Charles the Seventh were fond of arts, and patronised its professors, founding for them the Paris Academy of Painting. The Duke of Berry and the Duke of Orleans were equally remarkable for their love of art. The latter is known to have had in his service Colart of Laon, who laboured for him in the capacity of "peintre et varlet de chambre" in 1395 and 1396. But Colart de Laon appears to have been of that class of painters who adorned wooden carved work with colour. Jean Foucquet came later; and a picture is still left us from which his manner may be judged. It is the portrait of Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII., in the garb of the Virgin Mary, and surrounded by angels with red wings. This, after all, is a repulsive picture, hung up high in the Gallery of Antwerp, where the name of the master is not known, but is unmistakeably Flemish in tone and execution. It is a panel which gives us an imitation of Van der Weyden, and a foretaste of Memling; but is far below the works of these masters. The figure of the Virgin has some of the softness and élancé manner of Memling, and the Infant Saviour the heaviness of Van Eyck's representations.' 1 No. 106, Antwerp Cat. 0.91 met. by 0.81 met., French measure. Foucquet was born in 1415, and must have painted this picture before 1450, when Agnes Sorel died. Louis the Eleventh employed him to paint his likeness, in which Foucquet was unsuccessful; and Margaret of Austria seems to have prized a picture of his in her possession, which represented the "Virgin and Child." His style may be judged by the miniatures of an illuminated Josephus in the Paris National Library. Later still in France was Jehan Cloet, a painter whom we find employed at first in the household of the Duke of Burgundy, in 1475. The descendants of Cloet flourished in Paris for three generations. His son became painter to Francis the First; and the name of Jean having been lengthened into Jehanet, he gradually became the Jannette of our galleries. The portraits of Francis the First and his Queen, at Hampton Court, will show the style of Jehanet,1 and the influence exercised upon the early painters of France by the Flemish School. But the love of Francis the First for art was not satisfied by having a painter whose manner had been founded on the teaching of a Fleming. He occasionally sent to Belgium for pictures, dealing, usually, with Jean Dubois, of Antwerp; to whom we find him paying, on more than one occasion, large sums for pictures. Slight as was the influence of art in France during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was still more so in England, where the traces of painting are so feeble that the patient research of Vertue almost failed to discover 1 Nos. 329, 340, Hampton Court Gallery Catalogue. anything worthy of remembrance. It was not till the latter end of the fifteenth century that Mabuse painted in England. In the following century, numerous Flemish painters migrated from Flanders, and gave themselves up chiefly to the production of portraits. The earliest painters of Belgium did not, therefore, exercise any influence in England; and the manner which Mabuse, Cornelis, and Lucas de Heere imported, and made fashionable, was no longer the old and original one inherited from the Van Eycks-but a bastard and feeble style, adulterated by commingling with the various schools of Italy and Germany. |