Picture galleries outside London: Brighton Art Gallery and Museum

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1998 by Donald Bruce

The Willett Bequest is not totally disregarded. Out of the sixty-four pictures, none unimportant, seven are lined up in an aisle running past cabinets crammed with Staffordshire ware and similar examples of the past century's potter's art in the Ceramics Room. The aisle is so narrow that one is almost nose-to-nose with the figures in the paintings. It is impossible to move far enough away from Stubbs's large Forest Scene to take it in except piecemeal: a hunter with his groom and dog in deep shadow, with a luminous vista of a lake seen through tree-trunks and undergrowth. A lake mullioned by nearby trees was a favourite image of the Brightonian Aubrey Beardsley, who may have known this picture whilst it was still in Willett's private collection. Stubbs's landscape (its replica shown to better advantage at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in America) demands a more distant view, preferably from a seat, but there is no room, and all the chairs have been appropriated by the teashop.

In the same jumbled row is a Madonna from the circle of Bartolomeo Vivarini: a stiff, cat-faced Madonna clad in a densely embroidered gown, with an impish child at rest on her curiously foreshortened lap. In the attempted landscape behind her two angels, similarly truncated but smiling into the distance, hold a spiked crown (perhaps foreboding her son's crown of thorns) above her cowled head.

The panel depicting Balthasar, the Moorish king, is evidently from a polyptych of The Nativity. The near-heraldic figure lacks the subtlety of Barent van Orley, to whom it is at present attributed. The sharply demarcated areas of flat colour, as in a church-window, are characteristic of Orley's contemporary and fellow-Fleming, Joos van Cleve. With the ageing of the black paint on which they were simply imposed, the lines of Balthasar's features can scarcely be discerned.

Only two indisputably independent pictures survive by Albert Cornelisz, who settled in Bruges before 1513 and collaborated with Adriaen Ysenbrandt, the last follower of Memlinc: The Coronation of the Virgin, awash with a flood-tide of angels, in the Jacobskerk in Bruges, and the less successful Glorification of the Virgin at Brighton, in which the homely Madonna is again surrounded by angels who fade, as in the Bruges picture, dim-faced into the sky. The nearer angels stoutly haul up the tips of the crescent moon on which she stolidly steps above a skein of dark cloud which unsatisfactorily denotes her transition to heaven from the Flemish village below. Lacking the otherworldly refinement of the School of Memlinc, Cornelisz also worked, whilst retaining his base in Bruges, with the less delicate and earthier Lucas van Leyden, who cleared the way for the rustic scenes of Pieter Bruegel. The later works of Albert Cornelisz, known in his lifetime as a prolific painter, are probably subsumed without attribution in the products of Lucas's workshop.

Pre-eminent among the Netherlandish works from Willett's collection are those by the painter designated by Friedlaender 'the Master of Hoogstraeten' because of his altar-piece (now in the Museum of Fine Art in Antwerp) painted for the village church of Hoogstraeten, between Antwerp and the Dutch border. Only the Master's Resurrection is open to public view. The Roman soldiers, beetle-like in their armour, are surmounted by Christ's slight form in a magically rendered effect of upward drift. His slender presence (shrouded, unassuming) counterpoises the gross solidity of the soldiers in their brutal and sinister armour. Of the handful of pictures on display, this small work by a master, unknown by name, is in my opinion the most beguiling. The Master may have followed Gerard David from the borderlands of Flanders to become his pupil in Bruges. Later he moved to Antwerp, where he worked alongside the scholar-painter Pieter Coecke. He has affinities with Jan Mostaert, who worked near Antwerp at Mechelen. Perhaps the selfsame artist won two nicknames from Friedlaender: the pseudo-Mostaert may also have been the Master of Hoogstraeten. He certainly deserves further research.