The Flemish Primitives
In Bruges, Ghent, Tournai and Brussels, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling created a painting in oil with a wealth of detail and a light that had no equal in Europe.
Under the Dukes of Burgundy the southern Netherlands were the richest region in Europe. The court, the church, the nobility and the great trading houses commissioned altarpieces, portraits and devotional images, and foreign merchants in Bruges took paintings home to Italy, Spain and the cities of the Hanseatic League. The painters have been called the Flemish Primitives, a 19th-century name that does not refer to anything primitive but to their being the first.
Jan van Eyck, court painter to Philip the Good and resident in Bruges, completed the Ghent Altarpiece in 1432. He did not invent oil painting, but he refined the technique with thin, translucent layers that gave the colours depth and glow. Reflections in armour, the light in a pearl and every hair of a fur were rendered with an accuracy that made his contemporaries speak of a new way of seeing.
Rogier van der Weyden from Tournai, town painter in Brussels from 1436, gave painting a new emotional power with figures who weep and mourn. Dieric Bouts worked in Leuven, Hugo van der Goes in Ghent, and Petrus Christus, Hans Memling and Gerard David in Bruges. Towards 1500 the harbour of Bruges began to silt up, and artistic life moved to Antwerp.