Art: Our Lady Immigrant

With considerable pride but without great fanfare, New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art last month announced the acquisition of the famed Belgian Merode triptych. The Annunciation. By last week the Met's purchase of the altarpiece had become an international cause célébre. Said a resolution signed by 22 of Belgium's top museum directors and art teachers: "Often in the course of its history Belgium has had to witness, powerless, the destruction or pillage of its artistic patrimony. Once more, and this time without being able to cite the accident of bombardment or the whim of an invader, our country has just been dispossessed of an inestimable treasure, of the most important work in a Belgian private collection."

The Met's director, James J. Rorimer, granted that he had. indeed, bought a treasure. "There have been few, if any, opportunities in the last 30 years to purchase a more enchanting work of art," he said. "This picture stands as one of the great landmarks of Western painting."

Painting of Mystery. The Merode triptych is one of the great mystery paintings. The painter, date and donor are all matters of conjecture, though the Met's Curator Theodore Rousseau Jr. makes a good case for attributing it to Robert Campin and dating it about 1420. In this century it has been exhibited only twice—in Bruges in 1912 and in Paris in 1923. Since then it has been kept out of sight.

The fact that it has been unavailable for study has not kept art historians from recognizing it as one of the world's masterworks, painted probably in Tournai at the moment when Western art was undergoing its metamorphosis into the style of the Renaissance. It is discussed with reverence in almost every Belgian art course. Done in oil and brushstroked with a miniaturist's love of detail, the altarpiece (see cut) heralds the trend toward realism and shows in a format only 25⅛-in. tall the donors (left), the Annunciation scene and St. Joseph in his workshop, with mousetrap on the windowsill (right). The artist painted window views of Tournai's streets and shops so minutely that only a magnifying glass reveals their full delight.

Best-Kept Secret. How such a world-famed masterpiece arrived at the Met is so far one of the art world's best-kept secrets. The Met has had the triptych for more than a year, hints that it has not been in Belgium since World War II, gives no hint as to the identity of the seller. Several months ago (long after the fact) Belgian authorities heard rumor of a pending sale, called on the Merode family, which had owned it for two generations, to stop the transaction. When it was pointed out that the altarpiece had been willed to the daughter of Count Guillaume d'Henricourt de Grünne. King Baudouin himself intervened in an effort to keep the work in Belgium. What no one told the King was that Countess Jeanne de Grünne, 28, had long since given up title to the famous work.