compositions Eyck's works have the accidental charm of the picturesque,
the pulsating warmth and individual richness of life itself. By the impetus
of his thrust Jan van Eyck is carried further towards his own goal than
any other painter of the fifteenth century. Taking the contrast between
Eyck and Rogier as a touchstone for the evaluation of the other known
Netherlandish painters, Geertgen tot Sint Jans of Haarlem, who represents
the purely Dutch art, stands closer to Eyck than to Rogier.

Apart from personal genius that triumphantly transcends place and
time, we may regard as Germanic heritage the impulse to observe nature
that bears such fruit throughout Eyck's work and confers a universally
acknowledged superiority on Netherlandish panel painting. Rogier's
constructive form, and clear-cut pictorial ideas, which for two generations
supplied Netherlandish workshops and painters far beyond the boundaries
of the land with a formalized pattern of expression, can be regarded as
half French. For is not the contrast between Claude and Ruysdael,
between Watteau and Gainsborough, too, in some measure the contrast
between the constructive draughtsman and the observant painter?
France's supreme achievement in religious architecture and in the grand
sculpture of the Middle Ages went far beyond what was achieved in the
Germanic lands. An additional symptom of the innate French genius for
architecture and sculpture.

The Southern Netherlands, especially the cities of Flanders and
Brabant that flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, draw their
artistic talent from the half-French South and the Germanic East. The
North Netherlandish, Dutch art may be regarded as purely Germanic,
whereas in Flanders and Brabant Eyckian observation blends with the
formalism of Rogier, the German with the Latin.

-5-