STRANGE STORY OF A PICTURE.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19033, 10 June 1924, Page 7

STRANGE STORY OF A PICTURE.

“Wayfarer ” in the New Statesman, tells this romantic story of a famous picture:— “If my readers will turn to Article 247 of the Treaty of Versailles they will see that it provides for the delivery to Belgium of two pictures or parts of pictures, i.e,, the ‘leaves’ or wings of Van Eyck’s famous triptych, The Mystic Lamb, formerly in the Church of St. Peter at Ghent, and the leaves of the triptych of the Last Supper, by Dierick Bouts, formerly in the Church of St. Peter at Louvain. But they will not learn the history of this strange interpolation of art into politics. It is this. The wings of the Van Eyck represented an Adam and Eve, clothed, I regret to say, only in fig leaves. About a hundred years ago a canon of the diocese found this costume inadequate or incompatible with the religious atmosphere of St. Bavon’s, and sold the picture to a British art dealer. He again sold it to an agent of Frederick William 111., whp paid 2010,000 thaler for it out of his own pocket.

"Up to 1919 the picture was hung in the Berlin Museum, But at the conference the Belgian delegates claimed it in compensation for the famous altar-piece from Louvain which, they declared, a German officer had wantonly thrown into the flames of the burning library. The Belgian delegates claimed that this Vandalism should be punished, and that not only should the wings of Dierick Bouts’s picture be restored to Belgium (like the Van Eych wings, they had been sold years before and had ultimately come to Germany), but that the wings of the Van Eych altar-piece should be thrown in. The story was accepted, and the two pictures transferred.

"But it was not true. The Dierick Bouts altar-piece was not thrown into the flames by the Germans or by anyone else. The picture is still in existence at Louvain, perfectly intact, and the Germans were not the destroyers, but its preservers. A German officer saved it from the flames and gave it to the burgo-master, who had it taken for safe custody to the vaults of the town hall and walled in there. It has been duly unwalled, and the only touch needed if for the Van Eyck picture thus acquired to be hung by its side, a votive offering to the God of Justice, who presides equally over war and peace.”