[4] This picture has not yet received an official number.
After having been successively attributed to Van Eyck, Van der Weyden,
Memlinc, and David’s pupil Ysenbrant, the _Marriage at Cana_ (No.
1957, Plate XVIII.) is now generally admitted to be designed and
partly executed by Gerard David, although the panel shows unmistakable
evidence of being completed by another and less skilful hand. Mr. Weale
has shown, on the strength of a certain document, that the picture may
have been finished by Ysenbrant, but he has been unable to establish
that the document quoted by him refers to this particular picture.
There can be no doubt that David himself painted the figure of the
Donor, kneeling on the left, a marvellous example of early portraiture,
and the Donor’s son, the Christ, and the boy carrying the cake. Some of
the other heads are almost wooden in their hardness. The head of the
Dominican looking into the hall through an opening beyond which is to
be seen the Place du Saint-Sang, at Bruges, is clearly an afterthought,
and is introduced so clumsily that the wall and the page-boy with the
cake-dish really leave no room for the friar’s body. There is a curious
lack of spiritual cohesion in the picture—the majority of the figures
look away from the Saviour as well as from the bride, although the
significance of the moment is such as to demand a concentration of
everybody’s attention on the Christ. The picture, of which there are
several replicas, notably one at the Stockholm Museum by David’s pupil
Ambrosius Benson, was until 1580 in the Chapel of the Saint-Sang at
Bruges, and then in the collection of Louis XIV., from which it passed
into the Louvre.
The triptych (No. 2202A) of the _Virgin and Child, with Two Angels_,
in the centre, and _Two Donors presented by St. John the Baptist and
St. John the Evangelist_, on the wings, is officially catalogued as
an anonymous picture of the Flemish sixteenth-century school, but is
unquestionably an early work of Gerard David. It is interesting to note
that the male Donor is the same as the Donor in the _Marriage at Cana_,
though younger in years, and that the delightful and strangely Italian
_putti_ on the capitals of the columns that flank the Virgin’s throne
recur again, reversed, in David’s _Judgment of Cambyses_, at Bruges.
The _Adam_ and _Eve_ on the outside of the shutters are inspired by the
corresponding figures on the great Van Eyck altarpiece at Ghent. The
Louvre triptych was bought at the Garriga sale in Madrid, in 1890, for
£248.