|
|
 |
|
|
Portrait of Marie de Pacy
Copy after Robert Campin
about 1425 (original)
Oil on panel, 44.5 x 31.5 cm
Tournai, Musee des Beaux-Arts
|
| | | Inscriptions:
- on the inner frame: Bien Faire Vaint (Good Deeds Vanquish).
- on the outer frame: A 1425 / Les armes de iehenne cambri.
Portraits of Barthelemy Alatruye and his wife Marie de Pacy form a diptych of a married couple. This kind of diptych is almost as old as the individual form of portrait. It is composed of two individual portraits, compositionally harmonized with one another and generally hinged together.
The sitters are portrayed in three-quarter profile, facing each other. The man is traditionally positioned on the heraldic right (dexter) and the woman on the heraldic left (sinister). Their hands are placed just above the lower edge of the painting, as that they are resting on the picture frame. The same treatment of the picture frame as the window frame is also present in portraits of Jan van Eyck.
“Barthelemy Alatruye, a high-ranking financial functionary in the chambre des comptes at Lille, was a close confidant of the Burgundian ducal house. He belonged to that circle of associates and courtiers around the Duke of Burgundy for whom Jan van Eyck would later act regularly as portraitist.” (Felix Thurleman, Robert Campin, A monographic study with a critical catalogue, Prestel, p. 80)
The difference in size of sitters’ hands most probably shows that the paintings were copied by two different artists, after 1562.
|
|
|
|
Diptych | |
|
|
|
|
|
Related articles:
|
|
|
|
 Related links:
|
|
|
| This Collection |
|
|
|
|
|
 "Portrait of Marie de Pacy")
)