o those who have visited the Rijks Museum,
where a copy hangs. The robe is black, the hat, conical, is brown, the
background blue-green. The silhouette is vigorously modelled, the
expression one of dignity, the glance penetrating, severe. What
characterisation! The Christ is a small panel surpassingly rich in
colour and charged with profound pity. The body lies in the arms of
the Mother, Magdalen and John on either side. The sun is setting. The
subject was a favourite of Weyden; there is a triptych in Berlin and a
panel at The Hague. This Brussels picture has evidently been shorn of
its wings. There are replicas of the Virgin and Child (No. 650 in the
catalogue) at Berlin, Cassel, and Frankfort, also in the recently
dispersed collection of Rudolph Kann. Another striking tableau is the
head of a woman who weeps. The minutest tear is not missing.

Hubert and Jan Van Eyck's Adam and Eve are the wings (volets) from the
grand composition in the Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent. They are
gigantic figures, nude, neither graceful nor attractive, but
magnificently painted. These portraits (they don't look as if they had
been finished in paradise) of our first parents rather favour the
evolutionary theory of development. Eve is unlovely, her limbs lanky,
her bust mediaeval, her flanks Flemish. In her right hand she holds the
fatal apple. Adam's head is full of character; it is Christ-like; his
torso ugly, his legs wooden. Yet how superior to the copies which are
now attached to the original picture at Ghent. There the figures are
clothed, clumsy, and meaningless.

Dierick Bouts's Justice of Emperor Otho III is a striking picture. The
subject has that touch of repulsive cruelty which was a sign of the
times. Hans Memling's Martyrdom of St. Sebastian is another treasure;
with his portraits of a man, of Guillaume Morel and of Barbara de
Vlandenberg making an immortal quartet. The head of the man is the
favourite in reproduction. Morel is portrayed as in prayer, his hands
clasped, his expression rapt. A landscape is seen at the back. The
Virgin Surrounded by Virgins, by an unknown master of the fifteenth
century (school of Bruges), is one of the most amazing pictures in the
collection. It has a nuance of the Byzantine and of the hieratic, but
the portraits are enchanting in their crystalline quality. Quentin
Matsys' Legend of St. Anne is much admired, though for sincerity we
prefer The Passion of the Master of Oultremont. Gerard David's