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ART 505
brasses in England, those in St. Margaret's, King's Lynn, are
by Flemish workmen. In England as opposed to the Conti/
nent the figures were cut out and bedded in stone, lettered surrounds
and canopies being likewise cut out (PL 102 &). From
the early fourteenth till century the late sixteenth this remained
an extremely popular form of memorial, and even today many
survive. At its best this is a medium of delicacy and distinction;
in its economical lines a great survey of costume and
armour is chronicled for us; but it lent itself to
repetition and
shop production and the later brasses reach a low level of insipid
clumsiness.
The history of is English painting at this
stage confused and
hard to judge. From 1350 Master Hugh of St. Albans was in
charge of the painted decorations of St. Stephen's chapel at
Westminster. Something ofthe general design is known from
early nineteentlvcentury copies, and a fragment, the scene of
the children of is Job, now preserved in the British Museum. It
is curiously Italianate in conception; the rounded modelling,
the relations of the figures to the space are quite apart from
Gothic conventions. Master Hugh is known to have had some
painted 'Lombard* panels; certainly in some way Italian
models were available. Their influence is visible not only in
these wall-paintings but in the work ofan English illuminator
responsible for a series of illustrations to Genesis (B.M. MS.
Egerton 1894) and to the so-called Derby Psalter. This was a
Giottesque influence; Sienese models, more closely bound up
with the
general international style, can also be traced in pages
such as the Gorleston Psalter Crucifixion. For a time it seems as
though the English decorative school was submerged beneath
an influx of continental styles.The English idiom ofdetailed,
intricate surface patterning re-asserts itself, however, all the
more intensely because on a small scale, in the psalters made for
the Bohun family, where the Italian and English influences
meet and blend.
English art was now losing its anonymity, at least to the ex
tent that there are many known names ofmaster masons, sculp
tors, painters, illuminators, and glaziers.
It Is not always, how-