JAN VAN EYCK'S Virgin and Child with a donor, known as the Van Maelbeke Virgin and celebrated since the early nineteenth century as the artist’s last and unfinished picture, adorned the choir of the collegiate church of St Martin’s, Ypres, for more than three centuries. Around 1757 it was removed from the church and in the 1790s it was lost during the French occupation of Ypres. However, visual and literary sources provide a good idea of its appearance: its design is known from two mid-fifteenth-century pattern drawings (Fig.1), a late sixteenth-century print (Fig.2), an early seventeenth-century triptych (Fig.3) and a memorial painting of 1645 (Fig.4). According to the Ghent Humanist Marcus van Vaernewyck, who in 1568 published an extensive description of it in his Den Spieghel der Nederlandscher Audheyt (see the Appendix below, III), the central panel showed an abbot or provost kneeling before the Virgin and Child while the wings had images in two registers symbolising the purity of the Virgin: Moses’s burning bush, Gideon’s fleece, Ezekiel’s gate and Aaron’s rod.

THE STORY OF the Rembrandt paintings at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen bears some similarity to what happened at the Wallace Collection in London. There, in the late 1980s, the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) judged that four of the Collection’s five paintings then still attributed to Rembrandt could not be accepted as authentic, leaving only one of the twelve paintings in the Wallace once ascribed to Rembrandt as an authentic work. In fact, the Rembrandts in Copenhagen met with an even worse fate. In 1911, Karl Madsen, the director of the Museum at that time and a dedicated Rembrandt scholar who in many ways was the Danish counterpart to Wilhelm von Bode and Abraham Bredius, published Billeder af Rembrandt og hans Elever i Den kongelige Malerisamling (‘Pictures by Rembrandt and his pupils in the Royal collection of paintings’), listing eight works by Rembrandt. As Madsen’s studies progressed over the following decades, the number of Rembrandts in the collection increased, and in 1931 he brought the tally of authentic Rembrandts up to ten. However, in the next catalogue of the Museum’s collection of old-master paintings, published in 1946, this number was halved. In 1969 Horst Gerson removed another four works from the list in his revised edition of Bredius’s 1935 Rembrandt catalogue, reducing the Museum’s collection of authentic works to just one: the Supper at Emmaus of 1648. However, in 1987 the RRP made a preliminary statement rejecting the authenticity of all the works at the Statens Museum for Kunst that had once been attributed to Rembrandt.

THE NUMBER OF paintings firmly attributed to Johannes Vermeer is relatively small: thirty-five are generally agreed upon, although even some of these have been fiercely debated for decades. Attribution is hindered by the remarkable paucity of documented facts relating to Vermeer’s life. John Michael Montias’s exhaustive research has uncovered numerous leads regarding his patronage and circumstances but, unlike many of his contemporaries whose pupils or followers left both verbal and visual descriptions of their masters’ workshops, we have no clear idea of the character of Vermeer’s studio, his working practices or initial training.1 When the small painting of a Young woman seated at a virginal (Figs.22 and 24) was acquired in 1960 by the late Baron Rolin, its status as a seventeenth-century painting, let alone as a Vermeer, was doubted by several leading scholars, and for many years afterwards there was little agreement on its attribution. In the run-up to the picture’s sale at Sotheby’s, London, in 2004,2 the attribution to Vermeer became more widely accepted, largely due to the findings of the technical examination of the work, which were summarised in the sale catalogue but are here presented in full for the first time.

IN HIS MONOGRAPH on Piet Mondrian, published in 1956, Michel Seuphor vigorously dismissed the comment of an earlier critic that Mondrian’s art is ‘pure feeling’, that the artist ‘does not reason’ and that he ‘dreams in the abstract’. Throughout his book, Seuphor is at pains to assert Mondrian’s sobriety and intellectual standing. The success of Seuphor’s account is marked by the frequent link made today between Mondrian’s painting and rationality, although a steady and persistent tradition has developed of writings concerned with his psychological state.

A NEWLY DISCOVERED painting by Jacob Jordaens, The adoration of the shepherds (Fig.45), is now on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and will remain on view there to the end of August. It hangs adjacent to the artist’s earliest known dated work, The adoration of the shepherds of 1616 (Fig.46), and the comparison immediately makes it obvious that the newly discovered panel was painted a little earlier, probably in 1615. More than that, it is one of the first works in which Jordaens, who never went to Italy, introduced his own rugged version of the Caravaggesque style, in response to recent pictures by Rubens and by Abraham Janssen van Nuyssen. Perhaps the painting’s bold, almost rash adaptation of an Antwerp manner – virtuoso performances such as Rubens’s Old woman and a boy with candles (recently acquired by the Mauritshuis, The Hague; see Fig.II on p.158 below) – helps to explain, along with the presence of surface grime, how such a picture could have been assigned to an unknown Flemish master when it came up for auction in Nice in the autumn of 2003.

IN 2004 THE National Gallery of Art, Washington, acquired a recently discovered landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. Northern landscape, spring of c.1823–25 (Fig.47) came to light several years ago as a result of the liquidation of a private estate, having spent nearly 180 years in obscurity. Found in the back room of a small auction house in Munich, it was sold to a collector as the work of an anonymous German Romantic artist. Although dirty and suffering from two tears, the unlined painting, when cleaned and repaired, turned out to be in excellent condition, and was authenticated as by Friedrich by Helmut Börsch-Supan, author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné. About fifty of Friedrich’s known works are still unaccounted for, and undoubtedly dozens more are unrecorded. While the number of lost paintings suggests that some will eventually resurface, the rarity of works by Friedrich on the open market makes Washington’s acquisition especially felicitous.

IN JULY 1910 Jens Thiis, then the recently appointed director of the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo, visited Paris where he bought for the collection Vincent van Gogh’s Self-portrait (F528; Fig.52) from the dealer Eugène Blot. Not until the 1970s were doubts raised as to the authenticity of this work. In the autumn of 2002 the question became urgent when Johannes Rød published his dissertation on the painting for the University of Oslo, arousing considerable interest in the press. The National Gallery was widely criticised for having withheld from the public the information that the picture was possibly ‘a fake’.

WHEN VINCENT VAN GOGH was living with his brother Theo van Gogh at 54 rue Lepic, Montmartre, Paris, they had lodging with them, during the autumn and winter of 1886–87, the Glasgow art dealer Alexander Reid (1854–1928). Reid had come to Paris to work for the modern department of Boussod & Valadon (formerly Goupil) which was run by Theo van Gogh.