Memling to Van Dyck: Flemish Art at the Wallace Collection

Excellent three day online course from Art History in Focus looking at the history of Flemish art via pictures in the Wallace Collection.

Lead by Sian Walters via Zoom this course, of two hours each morning over three days, had a good mix of lectures and interactive sessions. She used Zoom well to give variety and her style meant you did have a sense of doing this with a group of people not just in a room on your own at your laptop.

Day one we looked at the early artists, mainly Van Eyck, Van der Weyden and Memling. She admitted early on that the Wallace Collection did not have a good representation of these artists, just one Memling, but she used other pictures to tell the story in a clearway. I must admit these are some of my favourite so it was nice to take some time over them.

Day two was Rubens starting by focusing on the galleries wonderful Rainbow Landscape, a section of which is shown here, then looking at his life and career and finally going through other pictures and studies by him in the collection.

Finally, day 3 turned to Van Dyck, putting him not only in the context of the Flemish tradition via his tutor Rubens but also looking at the influence of Titan, pictures by whom he collected and saw at the English court. We then looked at his portraiture and again ended the day by going through his pictures in the Wallace Collection.

This was the first of Sian’s online courses I had done and I’ll certainly be looking out for others. Apologies again for the barking dog in one discussion session. The perils of Zoom!

 


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