EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Brief Description of Item Workshop of Dieric Bouts (active by 1457-1475) St Luke drawing the Virgin and Child Oil on canvas, transferred from panel in 1899, measuring 109.2 x 86.4 cm

The Virgin and Child and St. Luke are depicted in an interior with a tiled floor before an arcade with a landscape beyond. The Virgin is seated against a damask cloth of honour. Unlike many paintings exploring this subject matter, in which the Virgin is depicted breastfeeding, here she offers fruit to the naked Christ Child. St Luke (who may also be a self-portrait of the artist or a member of the confraternity who commissioned this picture) is positioned with one knee bent, making a preliminary drawing, in silverpoint, of the Virgin and Christ Child before him. The panel (with integral frame) on to which St. Luke will paint the final composition can be glimpsed on a three-legged easel through the door on the right- hand side of the picture.

2. Context Provenance: Josse-Piere Geedts (1770-1834), Leuven by 1818; William, Prince of Orange by 1824; his deceased sale, The Hague, de Vries, Roos, Brondgeest, 9 September 1851, lot 7 (as style of Memling) for 105Dfl. to J.A. Brondgeest; William Scoltock; purchased from the above by Edward, Lord Penrhyn (1800-1886); thence by descent.

Exhibition History: Bruges, Exposition de tableaux Flamands des XIVe, XVe et XVle siècles, 15 June-5 October 1902, p.28, no.115 (as Dieric Bouts, c. 1450); London, Examples of the Flemish and Belgian Schools, 1906, (as Dieric Bouts); London, Exhibition of Old Masters, 1911, p.96, no.92 (as probably by Albert Bouts); London, Flemish and Belgian Art, January- February 1927, Memorial Volume, ed. M. Conway, pp.31-32, no.68 (as Albert Bouts); London, Exhibition of Flemish and Belgian Art 1300-1900, 1927, p.34, no.68 (as Dieric Bouts); London, Flemish Art 1300-1700, 1953-54, p.12, reproduced p.17 in Souvenir edition (as Albert Bouts)

Selected Bibliography: Baron de Keverberg, Ursula, princesse britannique, Ghent, 1818, pp.234-35; G. Hulin de Loo, in Exposition de tableaux Flamands des XIVe, XVe et XVle siècles, Ghent, 1902, p.28, no.115; K. Voll, Die Altniederländische Malerei von Jan van Eyck bis Memling, Leipzig, 1906, pp.122-123; H. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 1915, English translation. 1932 New York, 1950, pp.77 and 70; S. Boisserée, ‘Notizien zur sammlung des Prinzen von Oranien 1824’, in E. Firmenich-Richartz, Die Brüder Boisserée, vol.1, Jena, 1916, p.505; M. Conway, The van Eycks and Their Followers, London, 1921, p.166; L. Baldaß, ‘Die Entwicklung des Dirk Bouts, eine stilgeschichtliche Untersuchung’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wein, vol. 6, 1932, p.112; W. Schöne, Dieric Bouts und seine Schule, Berlin and Leipzig, 1938, p.208-09, no.133, pl.89a; Smith College Museum of Art Bulletin, 1958, no.38; M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol.III, Dieric Bouts and Joos van Ghent, Leiden and Brussels, 1968, p.71, no.84, reproduced pl.94 (as follower of Dieric Bouts); J. Rivière, ‘Réflexions sur les Saint Luc poignant la Vierge de Campin à Van Heemskerck’, Jaarboek Koninkliijke Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, 1987, p.60-62, reproduced fig.22; D. de Vos, Rogier van der Weyden. Das Gesamtwerk, Munich, 1999, under no.8, p.206. 3. Waverley Criteria

This picture meets both Waverley Criterion 2 and 3. The painting has an excellent claim to be considered of outstanding aesthetic importance, thus meeting the Waverley 2 criterion. It is closely associated with Dieric Bouts (active by 1457-1475), who is regarded as one of the leading fifteenth-century Netherlandish painters, not least because he was one of the most important exponents of oil painting which transformed European painting in the Renaissance and renowned for his rendering of landscape. There are ten paintings associated with Dieric Bouts and his workshop in the National Gallery but their quality (and number) is the exception in the UK. As a devotional painting with the capacity to make an outstanding contribution to the study of the St. Luke tradition in the Netherlands, the painting also meets the criterion set out in Waverley 3. Despite the fact that numerous variants on this important theme were made in the Netherlands at this time, paintings of this subject and period are extremely rare in public collections within the United Kingdom. This unfortunate lacuna probably arose because only a few nineteenth-century connoisseurs collected paintings by Bouts. It is for these reasons that Saint Luke drawing the Virgin and Child is of interest, both to art historians of the Northern Renaissance, and those concerned with the history of collecting and the reception of the Northern Renaissance in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

DETAILED CASE

1. Detailed description of item if more than in Executive Summary, and any comments

The painting depicts St. Luke drawing the Virgin. According to the Golden Legend, St. Luke’s Gospel was revealed to him by the Virgin Mary. It is this episode which identified him as her particular confidant, resulting in his special privilege of painting her with the Christ Child. Images of St. Luke drawing or painting the Virgin were a popular subject matter in the Netherlands in the fifteenth century and are particularly associated with chapels belonging to the painters’ guilds of St. Luke.

Bouts was probably born in Haarlem. He was strongly influenced by Rogier van der Weyden as the compositional dependency of the current work on van der Weyden’s St. Luke drawing the Virgin (Boston Museum of Fine Arts) shows. He was chiefly active in Leuven where his two sons Dirk the Younger and Aelbrecht also worked. The earliest dated work by the artist is the National Gallery's Portrait of a Man (1462). Only two other works are documented as being by Bouts. The attributions of The Head of Saint John the Baptist on a Gold Dish (Bowes Museum) and The Miracle of the Gallows (Laing Gallery) to him are not supported by either Friedländer or Schöne. It should be borne in mind that pictures by Bouts’ workshop are also comparatively rare in the UK. Beyond the National Gallery there are four paintings associated with Aelbrecht Bouts (Fitzwilliam Museum, Bowes Museum and the National Trust) and one by Dirk the Younger (Courtauld Institute).

Dieric Bouts was one of the leading and most influential Netherlandish painters of this period. Not only was he one of the pioneers of the oil painting technique but he was also the first of his contemporaries to make use of single-point perspective; these innovations are evident in Saint Luke drawing the Virgin and Child. Bouts’ work is also characteristic of an important moment in Early Netherlandish painting which showed a profound response to the Devotio Moderna by creating a style of painting which sought to collapse the psychological and physical distance between the viewer and the fictive scene in order to provoke a more powerful religious experience.

2. Detailed explanation of the outstanding significance of the item

This painting is of exceptional interest for two main reasons: its connections with Dieric Bouts and the subject of St. Luke drawing the Virgin that it depicts. Both elements are extremely rare, particularly in the context of the UK, but it is their combination in this work which renders it an important, and indeed unique, British cultural asset.

During the fifteenth century Netherlandish pictures were admired all over Europe for their visual sophistication, imagination and invention and those by Dieric Bouts and his workshop were no exception. Saint Luke drawing the Virgin and Child exhibits all of these characteristics. The patterned tiles lead the viewer’s eye through the composition, to the colonnade and landscape beyond. The face of St. Luke, which portrays both age and character, displays the key characteristics associated with Bouts’ portraiture. The expensive damask cloth of honour is exquisitely rendered, as are the tiled floor and marble columns. The detailed landscape beyond the colonnade, showing a walled town receding into a mountainous horizon, demonstrates why Bouts is viewed as one of the most important early Netherlandish landscape painters.

The attribution of this panel has been the subject of scholarly debate. Regardless of this uncertainty, between 1900 and 1950 Saint Luke drawing the Virgin and Child was included in several seminal exhibitions on early Netherlandish painting, in the UK and abroad. The work can therefore be viewed as fundamental to both early twentieth-century and current art historical scholarship on Netherlandish painting. Moreover, despite Dieric Bouts’ artistic significance, a number of outstanding questions remain to be answered concerning his oeuvre, particularly who was active in his workshop and how it was managed. This gap in knowledge has given rise to uncertainties concerning the attribution of paintings closely associated with the Bouts painting dynasty, an issue which is exacerbated by the absence of a modern monograph on Bouts. Research into this specific painting, as a workshop piece of great quality, has the potential to revise our knowledge of the authorship of just such panels.

In relation to Waverley 3, it should be reiterated that there are no other paintings of this date and origin depicting this important subject in British public collections by Bouts or any other northern European artist of the fifteenth century. As mentioned above, depictions of St. Luke painting or drawing the Virgin were a major part of artistic output in the Netherlands in this period. To have no representation of this important theme in Netherlandish painting in the UK would impoverish our ability to study a number of art historical phenomena. Firstly, the painting acts as a commentary on the new artistic consciousness in Northern Europe prior to 1500. In this painting, the artist’s elevated status is indicated by his portrayal as St. Luke, the classical surroundings, and the fact that he plays a central role in the narrative. This image is also informative from the perspective of understanding the material aspects behind painting in the fifteenth-century Netherlands. Most significantly, St. Luke is shown drawing a preparatory sketch using silverpoint. Such paintings are helpful to our understanding because, although few drawings survive from this period and region, they were an important and valued part of artists’ workshops at this time. Finally this work was made as a devotional painting; indeed both the Virgin and St. Luke were viewed as particularly effective intercessory figures in this period. The painting can thus be used to study the depiction of St. Luke as an artist in the context of Devotio Moderna imagery.

In summary this painting is of national importance. It is closely associated with an artist of European significance whose works are rare in general and especially in the United Kingdom. It illustrates a particularly important devotional and art historical theme, which may be viewed as a commentary on the wider fifteenth-century Netherlandish religious context, workshop practice and the changing status of the artist. Comparable examples do not exist in this country.