archive 2004

 

Arts Minister Estelle Morris has placed a temporary export bar on a painting by Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man in a Black Cap. The painting is a remarkable and unusual example of Memling's ability to render individual character and of his extraordinarily skilful painting.

 

Hans Memling was one of the greatest painters working in the Netherlands in the fifteenth century. This painting includes elements of his best portraiture. The Man is strongly characterised: his distinctive features, his long nose, broad mouth and large adam's apple, are rendered with great sensitivity and attention to detail.  His somewhat wistful expression as he looks out to the right of the painting suggests a thinking individual. 

 

Estelle Morris's ruling follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art that the export decision be deferred. The deferral will enable purchase offers to be made at the following agreed fair market price:

Where appropriate, offers from public bodies for less than the recommended price through the private treaty sale arrangements will also be considered by Estelle Morris. Such purchases frequently offer substantial financial benefit to both parties by the sharing of tax advantages.

 

Anyone interested in making an offer to purchase the painting should contact the owner's agent through:
 
The Secretary
The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art
Department for Culture, Media and Sport
2-4 Cockspur Street
London

SW1Y 5DH

 

 

 

1. Pictures of these items can be downloaded free of charge from our site on PA Picselect.  Please go to the DCMS folder situated within the Arts section of Picselect either at http://www.papicselect.com/ or through the PA bulleting board.

 

2. The painting measures 21.5 centimetres by 19 centimetres.

 

3. Hans Memling was born in Germany. By 1465 he was working in Bruges, where he pursued his career until his death in 1494. Some of his greatest religious works remain in Bruges, such as the altarpiece of the Two Saint Johns and the Floreins Triptych, as well as the Shrine of St Ursula.

 

4.  Memling's work was greatly in demand: his patrons included not only those from the city of Bruges and the Burgundian court, but also foreigners including Italians, those living in Bruges and others resident abroad: a triptych of the Virgin and Child was painted for the Florentine churchman Sandro Pagagnotti, and is currently divided between the central panel in the Uffizi and the wing panels in the National Gallery London.   Memling may have started his career in the workshop of the great Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden, and he was also strongly influenced by the work of his contemporary Hugo van der Goes. 

 

5. Memling's pictures are characterised by their colourful, harmonious and skilful compositions, elegant figures and exquisitely depicted textiles.  They frequently include landscape backgrounds of great beauty, with ambitious spatial and atmospheric effects (for example the dawn appearing on the reverses of the Pagagnotti wings).  Memling's work was greatly admired in Italy, and a number of Florentine painters copied motifs from his landscape backgrounds and incorporated them in their own compositions.

 

6. Memling was also a highly accomplished portraitist, as is evident not only in the donor portraits included in many of the altarpieces, but also in the surviving portraits of individuals, which are delicately characterised and extremely skilfully painted.

 

 

7. This portrait is one of a relatively small number of small-scale portraits painted by Memling.  Although it has been cut down, and was presumably originally a rectangle, its scale and composition show similarities to, for example, the portrait of an unknown man with an arrow in the National Gallery Washington.  Like the Washington portrait its style and composition, as well as the costume the sitter wears, suggests that it is an early work, dateable to about 1470. 

 

8. There is no means of identifying the sitter, whose dress and hat are simple in style.  The fact that the sitter looks to the right suggests that the portrait was intended to stand alone, rather than be joined to a religious image as a diptych: in that case the sitter would normally have faced in the opposite direction, and would have been shown with praying hands. 

 

9. It has been suggested that the background to the portrait, with the shadows which add to the sense of the sitter's presence, was added later, but this has not been proven, and there are certainly other portraits by Memling with plain backgrounds, and other portraits of the period which include cast shadows (such as the Portrait of a Woman from the Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden in the National Gallery).

 

10. The work of Memling is distributed throughout the leading collections of the world, in addition to the great works at Bruges.  There are about ninety works in all, of which the surviving portraits number about 25.   Memling is represented in UK public collections by the National Gallery collection of half a dozen works, but by only three other small works, in the Wallace Collection, the National Trust and the Royal Collection, of which the last two are portraits.