David Gerard Paintings |
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Biography of David GerardBelgian Northern Renaissance artist born 1460 - died 1523 Student of: Hans Memling (1435-1494) Netherlandish painter. David Gerard was born at Oudewater, now in southern Holland, but he worked mainly in Bruges, where he entered the painters' guild in 1484 and became the city's leading artist after the death of Memling in 1494. |
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At this time the economic importance of Bruges was declining, but it still maintained its prestige as a center of art
and he played an important role in the flourishing export trade in paintings that it developed in the first quarter of the 16th century. Among his followers were Rembrandt and Benson, who carried on his tradition until the middle of the 16th century. Most of David Gerard paintings was of traditional religious themes, but his best-known paintings are probably the pair representing The Judgment of Cabyses (Groeningemuseum, Bruges, 1498), a gory subject to which his reflective style was not ideally suited. In his early work David Gerard followed Haarlem artists such as Dirk Bouts, Albert van Oudewater and Geertgen tot Sint Jans, though he had already given evidence of superior power as a colourist. To this early period belong the St John of the Kaufmann collection in Berlin and the Saltings St Jerome. In Bruges he studied and copied masterpieces by the Van Eycks, Rogier van der Weyden and Hugo van der Goes. Here he came directly under the influence of Memling, the master whom he followed most closely. It was from him that David Gerard acquired a solemnity of treatment, greater realism in the rendering of human form, and an orderly arrangement of figures. |
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Only a few of his works have remained in Bruges: The Judgment of Cambyses, The Flaying of Sisamnes and the Baptism of Christ in the Groeningemuseum, and the Transfiguration in the Church of Our Lady. The rest were scattered around the world, and to this may be due the oblivion into which his very name had fallen; this, and the fact that, for all the beauty and the soulfulness of David Gerard artwork, he had nothing innovative to add to the history of art. Even in his best work he had only given newer variations of the art of his predecessors and contemporaries. His rank among the masters was renewed, however, when a considerable number of David Gerard paintings were assembled at Bruges for a 1902 exhibition of the early Flemish painters. |