Émile Verhaeren (1855-1916) art critic poet and homme de lettres was a man whose vision
transcended his native Belgium. With close ties to Mallarmé in France and Rilke in Germany
Verhaeren a peripatetic student of the arts readily traveled to Paris Berlin Cassel Vienna
and Amsterdam. From the mid-1880s until his death in 1916 his many trips abroad resulted in a
raft of essays and short monographs on the arts of the Northern Renaissance. Yet despite the
insights scholarship and markedly precise and revealing descriptions of these studies they
have long been neglected in art historical circles overshadowed perhaps by Verhaeren's own
poetic outpourings and his numerous essays on contemporary art. In this book Albert Alhadeff
translates edits annotates and contextualizes these often brilliant and always revealing
studies on artists such as Rembrandt Rubens Memling Bruegel and Grünewald masters from the
North who worked mostly in Flanders Holland and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. As Alhadeff reveals Verhaeren's studies of the masters of old in Germany Flanders
and the newly born Dutch Republic are as much about Verhaeren the man as they are about the
subjects of his inquiries.
