Robert Campin
NG 653.1  
A Man  
NG 653.2  
A Woman

Lorne Campbell, 1998

Extracted from:
Lorne Campbell, The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Schools (London: National Gallery Publications and Yale University Press, 1998).

Provenance

The portraits are stated to have been acquired in the Low Countries¹ by Friedrich Campe (1777–1846), a bookseller and publisher in Nuremberg.² A collector and author, he travelled extensively in Europe and certainly visited Bruges, but it has not been possible to establish when he was in the Low Countries or where he may have acquired the two paintings.³ He showed them on 3 April 1832 to Sulpiz Boisserée⁴ and in August 1833 to Georg von Dillis, who recommended that they should be purchased for the Munich gallery.⁵ After Campe’s death, they were sent to London with many of his other pictures. When the collection was sold by Christie’s on 18 May 1849, the portraits, lots 37 and 38, were bought by Nieuwenhuys. It was presumably Nieuwenhuys who sold them to the Paris collector Edmond Beaucousin (1806–66); they were purchased with the rest of the Beaucousin collection in 1860.

Exhibitions

NG 653.2: ‘Picture of the Month’, NG 6 October–2 November 1943 (not catalogued); London 1945 (not catalogued); ‘The Artist’s Eye: R.B. Kitaj’, NG 1980 (6, 7); London 1993 (not catalogued).

Technical Notes

Cleaned in 1986–7, both portraits are in excellent condition. There is a small damage in the woman’s mouth.

Both panels are of two boards of oak, vertical in grain and laid vertically; they measure 41.9 × 29.1 cm and 41.9 × 29.0 cm and are 11 mm thick. The joins are 10.4 cm and 18.7 cm respectively from the top left corners. Peter Klein has established that the oak is from the Baltic region; that the 66 rings of the left board of the Man were formed between 1341 and 1406; that the 121 rings of the right board were formed between 1290 and 1410; that the 115 rings of the left board of the Woman were formed between 1293 and 1407; and that the 61 rings of the right board were formed between 1276 and 1336. All four boards are from the same tree; indeed the two narrower boards appear to have been sawn from the same plank.⁶ The reverses (figs 1, 2) have chalk grounds. Both reverses are very damaged, with extensive losses and [page 73] repairs; they are decorated with red‐brown marbling, where red earth is present, and on the back of the Man, which is the better preserved of the two reverses, the marbling has a diagonal grain. On the obverses, the unpainted edges survive on all four sides of both portraits but have been slightly trimmed. Traces of green paint containing verdigris are found along the barbes, particularly noticeable on the right of the Man (fig. 6) and the two lateral edges of the Woman. Traces of red earth are found along the barbe at the top edge of the Woman. The red and green must have come from the poly‐chroming of the lost original frames, which were probably decorated with a greenish marbling.

On the obverses, there are chalk grounds. Under the microscope a pinkish priming, perhaps lead white tinted with red earth, is visible on the Woman. Infra‐red reflectography reveals limited amounts of underdrawing in a liquid medium (figs 3, 4). Ultramarine is present in the glazes on the man’s robe and the woman’s dress. The medium is linseed oil but the underlayers of the man’s robe, of its fur lining and of the woman’s veils and dress appear to be in egg tempera. No evidence of an egg underlayer can be found in the man’s hat or in the backgrounds but a little pine resin has been detected in the red lake glaze on the man’s hat.

The underdrawing includes areas of hatching, in short, parallel, evenly spaced strokes, in the man’s robe and probably also in his hat and in the woman’s dress. The contours of the man’s face below his left cheekbone and opposite his mouth are drawn to our left of the painted contours. The seam [page 74][page 75][page 76][page 77] between his collar and his robe was underdrawn as a fairly broad dark line and there are other lines in the collars which may be underdrawing. The reflectograms and X‐radiographs reveal further alterations made during the course of painting. The woman’s veils once lay in a slight downward curve across her forehead, intersecting with the visible, upward curve (fig. 5). The black background appears to have been painted after the veil and some minor changes in the contours were made at that stage.

The woman’s purple dress is underpainted in mixtures of red lake, lead white and black. Over that are mixtures of azurite and red lake, on top of which is a scumble of ultramarine. The fluted edges of her veils are rendered by painting strokes of thick white wet‐in‐wet(?) into the veils, which are very pale blue‐grey. In both portraits, lines scored into the paint have been used to stress certain contours and folds in the man’s hat and the woman’s veils, where dark lines have been painted with wonderful dexterity along some of the incisions in order to give them greater emphasis (fig. 8). With immense skill and economy, the painter has used other incised lines to create reflected lights, for instance on the fold of the woman’s veil across her left breast. A scored line exposes a little of the red lake underlayer of her dress and a narrow strip of ground to give the illusion of a light reflected from the dress into the shadow of the veil (fig. 7). An exposed stripe of red lake above the fur cuff of her right sleeve creates a secondary light. The fur cuffs themselves are grey, with black lines painted wet‐in‐wet into the grey and then dragged or feathered to give the illusion of texture (fig. 9).

Description

The man, who has brown eyes, wears a red hood or chaperon consisting of a bourrelet, the padded main part of the hat, a cornette or long, scarf‐like tail, and a patte or shoulder‐cape. Here the cornette has been wound round and round the bourrelet, of which only a small part is visible, above his forehead. The patte, its seam clearly shown, hangs across his left shoulder. The collar of his doublet is blackish; his robe is blue, lined with fur, closely pleated across his chest and tied with a knotted, purplish lace below his collar. The woman, who has blue eyes, wears three linen(?) veils, all of which have fluted or goffered selvedges. The under‐veil, which is doubled, covers two small horns, evidently of hair; a second veil, again doubled, is secured under her chin; while the third and largest veil, folded sideways so that the fold lies across her left shoulder, covers her head and shoulders and is secured to the first veil with pins made of yellow metal. Two of them are visible. Her dress is purple, edged with grey fur and set in narrow, regular folds across her breasts. Her belt is black and on the ring finger of her left hand she wears a gold ring set with a red stone.⁷ The backgrounds of both portraits are unrelieved black.

The Identity of the Sitters

When the portraits were in the Campe collection, the sitters were identified as Quinten Massys and his wife;⁸ when they were in the Beaucousin collection, and when they were first exhibited at the National Gallery, the sitters were called Roger van der Weyden and his wife.⁹ Von Tschudi thought that the man might have been an official of the Burgundian court.¹⁰ There are no indications of their identities, but their clothes, which are not excessively rich, suggest that they were relatively prosperous townspeople. They were clearly man and wife.

Attribution and Date

The portraits were attributed in the Campe collection to Quinten Massys, by Sulpiz Boisserée to van Eyck or his school, by Passavant and in the Gallery catalogues from 1861 to ‘Rogier van der Weyden the Younger’, by Bode to his ‘Master of Merode’ and by von Tschudi to the Master of Flémalle.¹¹ The attribution to the Master of Flémalle or Campin has come to be widely accepted, for instance by Friedländer;¹² Davies at first entertained doubts but finally thought it ‘wrong to separate them at all from the key‐pieces for attribution to Campin’.¹³ Frinta, though accepting that the Woman was by Campin, suggested that the Man was by a different painter.¹⁴

The paintings were certainly designed to form a pair. The boards of the supports are from the same tree; the measurements of the painted surfaces are to a millimetre the same; both portraits have at their edges traces of the same green pigments, evidently from the original frames; the reverses of both panels are marbled; in every aspect of technique, the two portraits resemble each other very closely indeed. The painter has shown staggering skill in working wet into wet paint, dragging wet brushstrokes and scoring lines into wet, or nearly dry, paint to stress or clarify contours or to create illusions of reflected lights (figs 7–9).

The two portraits are obviously convincing representations of the man and woman. Though the heads are emphasised by being slightly enlarged in proportion to the bodies, the drawing appears accurate and the tonal transitions are meticulously observed and recorded so that the textures of skin, cloths and furs are rendered with astonishing fidelity. The artifice with which the painter has ordered the sitters’ clothes and indeed their features is far from obvious. The two figures are assertively silhouetted against uncompromisingly flat backgrounds. The scarves of the man’s hat have been brought forward and disposed to flatten his bulk and make his contour very distinct. The noses and near eyes are turned fractionally too much into profile, while the far eyes and the far sides of the faces are flattened into a slightly more frontal view than spatial logic demands. The painter clearly confronted a problem in balancing the large head of the man against the much smaller head of his wife, but he has maintained an equilibrium by manipulating the areas of red and white created by their headdresses. The red scarf falls to meet the white veils and establish a strong visual link between the two panels.

The man slouches and causes the collar of his doublet to turn back and the front of his robe to open and show its fur lining. His head is off‐centre, depressed across his panel [page 79] towards his wife who, in contrast, sits up straight and who, because her near eye is exactly at the centre of the width of her panel, dominates the composition as her husband does not. Geometric harmonies are more obvious in the composition of the Woman than in that of the Man: her veils, in the lower left corner, run approximately parallel to the main diagonal; the triangles in which her veils fall are often congruent; her chin is almost exactly at the centre of the panel’s height. The composition of the Man is less fully resolved; the painter would appear to have left it deliberately unresolved.

The sitters are lit in different ways: the painter must have intended to show different schemes of lighting and rearranged his studio accordingly at all their sittings.¹⁵ The shadows cast on the man’s face stress the lines of his furrowed forehead, the frown lines between his eyes, the closeness of his eyebrows to his eyes, the down‐turning line at the near corner of his mouth, the sagging skin around his eyes and beneath his jaw. His wife, in contrast, creates a pattern of upward‐turning lines and her bright eyes, with gleaming catchlights and liquid lying along the lower lids, differ dramatically from her husband’s eyes, lustreless and averted from the light. His irises are partly concealed by his lower eyelids, whereas her irises float clear, just as her eyebrows are well above her upper eyelids. The man’s clothes echo the drooping lines of his face, the woman’s clothes the rising lines of her face: her eyes make visual rhymes with the veils over her temples; her mouth and the lower contour of her chin‐veils make the same basic shapes. The fact that the shapes of the veils were adjusted during the course of execution suggests that the artist was working very consciously towards these effects. The woman’s hands, brought upwards into her portrait, reinforce the impression of buoyancy that the other patterns create. The man’s hands do not intrude, perhaps because they would have been at variance with the predominantly falling lines of the pattern he creates.

The portraits are by a draughtsman of superlative ability, a painter of startling skill, who has used his genius for pattern‐making to reinforce his characterisation of his sitters: the depressed man and the more confident, optimistic woman. The subtleties of the counterpoint balance that links the portraits are comparable to those that relate the Flémalle Virgin and Child to the Saint Veronica. The interest in facial expression and emotion, the power to use pattern to heighten expressive effect, are comparable in the portraits and in the Flémalle panels. The portraits are therefore attributed to Campin. The clothes are in the fashion of about 1430¹⁶ and the dendrochronological evidence favours a date around or after 1435.

General References

Friedländer , vol. II, no. 55; Davies 1953, pp. 49–52; Davies 1968, pp. 27–8; Davies 1972, pp. 252–3; Campbell 1996, pp. 123–7; Châtelet 1996, pp. 155, 302.

Notes