The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings
National Gallery Catalogues

The National Gallery’s collection of fifteenth-century Netherlandish pictures is one of the largest and most important in the world. It includes works by Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, Petrus Christus, Dirk Bouts, Simon Marmion, Justus of Ghent, Hans Memling, Geertgen tot Sint Jans and Gerard David. Early Netherlandish paintings are noted for their veracity but also for their complexity, for their expressiveness and for their technical refinement. For centuries van Eyck was regarded as the ‘inventor’ of oil painting, and artists like van Eyck and van der Weyden powerfully affected the development of European painting in terms of style as well as technique.

In this catalogue, the detailed entry for each work represents the culmination of Lorne Campbell’s extensive research on the authorship, histories and iconographies of the paintings, on the patrons who commissioned them, and above all on the painters’ techniques and working practices – where he has worked in close collaboration with the National Gallery’s Conservation and Scientific Departments. Sophisticated modern methods of analysis have been applied in the examination of every painting, yielding extraordinary results. By assembling a rich combination of scientific and historical evidence, Dr Campbell has been able to reconstruct in detail how these striking paintings were made and, in so doing, greatly to advance our understanding and appreciation of the achievements of the Early Netherlandish painters.

These catalogue entries are the result of a pilot project to set up a process that takes the desktop publishing files that were sent to press, converts them to a more flexible digital format, and transforms them into web pages and other formats. This is a complicated process, as we are dealing with large and complex texts: these five trial entries alone come to 111,250 words.

We have tried to stay as close to the original texts and arrangements as possible, whilst also creating online entries that are self-contained: everything you need to understand the entry should be in that page, so sections like bibliographies, lists of abbreviations, glossaries, appendices and the explanation of how the catalogue works have been brought into the entry webpage from elsewhere in the catalogue. Because of the conventions followed in the original texts regarding references, we have had to assemble bibliographies from various sources: this is why entries may be formatted differently, or be briefer or more discursive than you might expect. We are investigating how we might improve this in the future.

Editorially, we have corrected obvious typos. We have also acquired new versions of the various images, which means that the credit lines have had to be updated to match the image suppliers' current requirements. Current collection images are temporary derivatives, which we hope to replace with a more refined system allowing access to higher-resolution or zoomable version in due course. Images, which often fell in the middle of running text in order to sit well on the page, have been moved to the next paragraph break after their original position - with the exception of the main image of the painting in catalogue, which has been moved to the head of the entry. (This explains why the page numbering may indicate empty pages.) Otherwise, we have not updated the texts to reflect current opinion: they reflect the state of knowledge at the time they were written. However, we are investigating ways in which curators can add a supplementary update.

Following assessment of this pilot, we hope to continue work on more entries, and to further develop our online publishing pipeline. In the meantime we hope you find them useful, and would welcome any feedback you might have.