A Young Man at Prayer mid 1470s

Hans Memling (1430–1440–1494)
The National Gallery, London
The Exhumation of Saint Hubert late 1430s

Rogier van der Weyden (c.1399–1464) (and studio)
The National Gallery, London
Mater Dolorosa probably about 1470-5

Dieric Bouts the elder (c.1415–1475) (studio of)
The National Gallery, London
The Seilern Triptych – The Entombment c.1425

Robert Campin (Master of Flémalle) (c.1375/1379–1444) (attributed to)
The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)

Jan van Eyck (c.1380/1390–1441) is the father of early Netherlandish art. The first master of oil painting, he made art of stunning beauty and veracity. It is said that artists from Italy, in trying to work out his method, scrutinised his Ghent altarpiece and sniffed at it in order to get a scent of the alchemy and its secret.

The National Gallery in London celebrates its 200th anniversary this year. Van Eyck's famous Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and his Wife (1434) was the first fifteenth-century painting bought for The National Gallery Collection in 1842, and its purchase coincided with a period of renewed interest in early Netherlandish art. A sense of why this revival occurred is found in an account by an English visitor to Germany in 1818, who commented on 'the deep feeling and great truth of character' in this art.

These sentiments endure: earlier this year, The National Gallery reported that the Arnolfini Portrait was the most viewed painting on its website – and on any visit to the gallery, this famous picture can be found surrounded by admirers.

The 'truth' of this art can be traced back to a transformation that occurred in painting in the Netherlands in the early fifteenth century. Van Eyck pioneered the use of oil-based paint, which gave greater possibilities for naturalistic art, in its handling and subtle use of colour. Instead of flat, outlined figures – seen for example in The Wilton Diptych (c.1395–1399) below – a sculptural quality was achieved, and surfaces of all kinds could be represented with stunning fidelity. Fabric and fur became tangible, shadows were cast, and mirrors, metal – even eyeballs – contained reflections.

Richard II presented to the Virgin and Child by his Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund ('The Wilton Diptych')

This art was supported by wealthy patrons, such as Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Fearful that he might lose Van Eyck's services, he wrote: 'we would not find his like more to our taste, one so excellent in his art and science.'

Philip was not alone in admiring Van Eyck's work. After The National Gallery's acquisition of the Arnolfini Portrait, the artist became a famous name in Britain and Europe, and this attention helped to bring other early Flemish painters to prominence, such as Hans Memling (1430–1440–1494) and Rogier van der Weyden (c.1399–1464).

The resurgence of these artists in the nineteenth century was further helped by the advocacy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which emerged around the same time. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, dozens of early Netherlandish works entered UK public collections, many to The National Gallery, through purchases or from personal bequests.

The Flemish masters individualised human subjects, giving them vivid personalities – these are people it seems we could know. Among the works of Memling are numerous portraits, usually of men – pious, serious men – executed with extraordinary naturalism. An adolescent moustache shades the upper lip of this unknown man, the throat appears ready to gulp, the fringe is untidied. The realism here is imitative – or 'photographic', as we might say with the benefit of hindsight.

Painted around the same time, the man in a portrait by Dieric Bouts (c.1415–1475) suffers from strabismus, or wall eye, which imparts animation – and a sardonic touch – to his face. This man, we feel, is real because of his imperfections. This is a trope of early Netherlandish art – and it is credible, and often beguiling, as a consequence.

In their religious imagery, Memling and Bouts showed off their skills to great effect. Memling's Donne Triptych, created as a portable altar for Sir John Donne around 1478, has the bold colours of a stained-glass window, the artist's finesse producing a range of subtle effects.

The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors (The Donne Triptych)

We notice how the materiality of the portative organ held by the angel on the right receives as much attention as the figure of Mary. Memling's eye is a great leveller: the inanimate seems to matter as much as the animate. In both its audacious playfulness and the elaborate detail of its garment, the angel on the left nearly steals the show.

The angel's intervention disturbs the stately stillness of the group, introducing some spontaneity into an otherwise emblematic scene. Memling does this in another work less obtrusively – The Virgin and Child with an Angel, Saint George and a Donor (about 1480) – in which the Christ Child seems distracted by an angel playing a lute. In each case, Jesus shows an infant's natural disregard for decorum, twisting on his mother's lap, rucking up the pages of her book.

The Virgin and Child with an Angel, Saint George and a Donor

Everything is deserving of the artist's attention – and thereby our own. Only at the horizon does the artist concede that colour loses its vibrancy and tends to a cooler blue. Otherwise, our vision is celebrated as a sense of commanding range and acuity. Nothing escapes it. The artist's skill rises to match our appreciation of the variousness of the world, which is itself a glorification of earthly abundance.

Both God and Mammon (a biblical term for riches) were forces behind this art. As our modern eye delights in its technical achievement, what we see are not simply assertions of painterly virtuosity. We are invited to behold the wealth of God's creation as it is expressed in the multiplicity of things. As art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote, this art was made in 'a new, uncompromising spirit which may be defined as a spirit of materialism rather than of mere naturalism'.

Bouts' Christ Crowned with Thorns (about 1470) is made more harrowing for its graphic detail: a dislodged thorn dreadfully pierces Christ's brow, and the tears that run and hang in glassy droplets on his face draw us close to the painting's surface, to see how the artist does it.

The explicit, emotional charge of this painting becomes shared grief in Bouts' The Entombment (probably 1450s), whose faded colours (painted as it was on cloth) seem appropriately muted.

For all its power, Flemish painting drew a sneering assessment from none other than Italian artist Michelangelo (1475–1564):

'Flemish painting will, generally speaking, please the devout better than any painting of Italy, which will never cause him to shed a tear, whereas that of Flanders will cause him to shed many; and that not through the vigour and goodness of the painting but owing to the goodness of the devout person.'

Michelangelo accounts for the emotional effect on beholders as being due to their gullibility, rather than the power of the image, a view hard to accept when we consider Bouts' Christ Crowned with Thorns, among many other examples. Michelangelo also criticised Flemish art for being artlessly imitative. But Flemish artists did not simply replicate.

Consider the room in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. It may appear realistic, but both the mirror and the chandelier are placed impractically low. Van Eyck has arranged his composition in order, according to art historian Craig Harbison, to 'create a compact zone of interaction and meaning'. Among several signs and symbols, the central alignment of the chandelier, mirror, touching hands and dog – all in their own clear unobstructed space – have received differing interpretations.

The dog may be said to speak of fidelity, but also sexual passion. The lit candle might also indicate passion, while the snuffed-out candle might mean death. The mirror has images of the Passion of Christ in its roundels – more death. We may never agree on the meanings of these motifs, but Van Eyck has arranged them meticulously for our consideration.

Robert Campin (c.1375/1379–1444), also known as the Master of Flémalle, was, alongside Van Eyck, an early exponent of the new virtuosity. A measure of the advances made in northern naturalism can be seen if Campin's portraits from the 1430s are compared with Italian art of the same period. Masaccio's (1401–1428) beautiful The Virgin and Child (1426), appears to us as if from a different era: it seems quite medieval alongside Campin's works.

Campin's couple could not be mistaken for Italian art. Aside from the painterly qualities, the people themselves have an uncompromising, ascetic character. The husband has a face – and a mood – that belongs to the north. Sagging and grumpy, his portrait is neither flattering nor noble. His turbaned head and upper body fill the picture space as if to impose his seriousness upon us, with no room for a context or compositional niceties.

His wife is younger and unsmilingly faithful, her stare as sharp as the pins which hold in place her headdress. These paintings are usually hung to look at each other, in a steely face-off.

Rogier van der Weyden did not achieve the technical realism achieved by Van Eyck, but his expressions of raw emotion, seen in The Descent from the Cross (before 1443) in the Prado, Madrid, are unmatched.

His more serene religious works take place in comfortable domestic settings, often with a view of the everyday world through a window. This approach reflects another stride towards a new way of representing devotional imagery, bringing together the human and the divine. As Jean-Claude Frère writes: 'the contemporary setting, underlined by the absence of haloes, is meant to draw the viewer in', allowing us to participate in the scene.

The Magdalen Reading (before 1438) is a fragment of a larger picture. This has left it with the unorthodox composition of a cropped photograph. We can imagine the prayer book replaced by a paperback, the white pot by a glass of wine or mug of tea. This is a young woman sitting on the floor at a party, engrossed in her book and in a world of her own, perhaps bored by the company.

The intimacy of indoor scenes is enhanced by our awareness of the outdoors. Campin was perhaps the first painter to include a street scene viewed through a window in his Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece) of around 1427–1432, and it became a feature of Netherlandish painting, along with glimpses of countryside.

Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece)

In a remarkable painting by the studio of Van der Weyden, a man leans forward as if to make better sense of his letter, and his unexpected posture gives us the powerful sense of his hunger to absorb its message. In seeking after naturalism, the artist has left us feeling somewhat disorientated, looking past him and through the window, unsure of what to look at – awkward intruders in his private space.

Where we catch sight of a town square, we can locate the scene in a typical urban setting, such as Bruges or Brussels, and we see the two worlds – that of the quiet interior, the stage for graceful Annunciations – and the mercantile realm beyond, whose wealth would nourish artistic activity and the art market for years to come.

The Virgin and Child before a Firescreen

A 1902 exhibition in Bruges titled 'The Flemish Primitives' gathered together masterpieces never seen before and reinforced the renewed interest in these artists. The term 'Primitives' may seem pejorative but was used to refer to a quality of delicacy and Christian piety. It also suggests a certain defensive admiration for an art that is seen as less realised than the full flowering of the southern Renaissance which followed it.

This does no justice to its humanity and sophistication, its honesty and its visual splendour, qualities which make these paintings the treasure of many of the world's great collections.

Adam Wattam, writer

This content was funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Further reading

Lorne Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues: The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Paintings, National Gallery London, 1998

Jean-Claude Frère, Early Flemish Painting, Terrial, 1997

Jenny Graham, Inventing van Eyck: the Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age, Berg Publishers, 2007

Craig Harbison, The Art of the Northern Renaissance, Laurence King, 1995

Susie Nash, Northern Renaissance Art, Oxford University Press, 2008

Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, Icon Editions, 1971

Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art 1400–1600: Sources and Documents, Prentice-Hall Inc., 1966