Bruges did not only buy art, it made it. Jan van Eyck lived and worked here until he died in 1441, Memling settled here in 1465, Gerard David ran the leading workshop after him, and the pictures they painted for Bruges churches and Bruges magistrates are, unusually, still in Bruges. The Groeningemuseum is where most of them ended up.
The painting to plan around is Jan van Eyck’s Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele, dated 1436. Van der Paele was a canon of St Donatian’s, the collegiate church that stood on the Burg until it was demolished after the French Revolution, and he is shown kneeling in his surplice with his spectacles and his breviary, flanked by St Donatian and St George. Two things repay standing still. One is the surface: the reflections in St George’s armour, the pile of the carpet, the old man’s skin. The other is the address — you can walk to the empty patch of the Burg where the church this was painted for used to be in about eight minutes.
Gerard David’s Judgement of Cambyses, 1498, is two panels, and they were made for the aldermen’s room of the town hall as a warning to the men who sat in it. They show the corrupt judge Sisamnes arrested and then flayed alive on the order of the Persian king, the story taken from Herodotus. The flaying panel is painted with complete, unhurried calm, which is what makes it hard to look at. If you have already done the Stadhuis, this is where that building’s self-image gets uncomfortable.
Also here: Hans Memling’s Moreel Triptych of 1484, a family group portrait set against a single landscape running across all three panels, which was a new idea at the time; Hugo van der Goes’ Death of the Virgin; and a Last Judgement triptych given to Hieronymus Bosch, though the attribution is disputed and it may be his workshop, or a collaboration between the two. Worth knowing before you stand in front of it.
The rest of the museum runs to six centuries, through neo-classicism, Flemish expressionism and 20th-century modern art including Magritte. It is a good collection. It is not why you came.
