The Frick Collection is the only museum in North America to present this exhibition of paintings by the important Netherlandish artist Hans Memling (1435-1494). The presentation of “Memling’s Portraits” from October 12 to December 31 draws upon major international collections and provides the most comprehensive overview ever undertaken of the artist’s successful career in portraiture, with a selection of 20 works by the master and his school. Nearly two-thirds of all of Memling’s recorded portraits are featured in this exhibition, which is considered to be an unprecedented viewing opportunity and one unlikely to be repeated.

The panels in this exhibition were executed in Bruges over a period of some 25 years, between 1470 and the artist’s death in 1494. While issues of chronology, authorship and the identification of sitters have long been debated by historians, the panels themselves never fail to impress – and sometimes amaze us – by their humanity, truthfulness and peerless technique.

Often placed before radiant, tranquil landscapes (Memling’s signal innovation to portraiture) the sitters appear close to the picture plane, frequently in seven-eighths as opposed to the more conventional three-quarters view, their hands (or hats) occasionally extending beyond the frame into the viewer’s own space. Measured and confident, Memling’s sitters display their prosperity and social position with dignity and grace. Their apparel is elegant and costly (Bruges was a center of cloth-making), but their adornment is never ostentatious. As for expression, they are almost always found in serious reflection, yet are not without emotion.

More or less similar in scale, format and presentation (most of the featured panels are half-lengths with hands), Memling’s portraits fulfilled both secular and religious functions. In Fifteenth Century Netherlandish art, portraiture had infiltrated devotional painting, as can be seen in his full-length standing Virgin, in which the anonymous donor kneels by his patron saint to receive the visit of the Mother and Child. Male donors often commissioned their likeness as part of a devotional ensemble.

The panel of the finely appareled young man in prayer, perhaps a merchant involved in the Spanish wool and textile industry, might have formed the left wing of triptych. In such a case, the central image of a Virgin and Child would have been flanked on the right by a portrait of the man’s wife. Portraits might celebrate forthcoming nuptials, commemorate a longstanding union or, as with a portrait of composer Gilles Joye, painted in 1472, have been created as an independent epitaph, to be placed near the sitter’s tomb.

Hans Memling, “Portrait of a Man,” circa 1470-1475, panel, 33.5 by 23 centimeters, purchased by The Frick Collection in 1968, photo: Richard di Liberto.

Although his date of birth is not recorded, Jan canMimnelinghe (Hans Memling) was born sometime between 1435 and 1440in the German town of Seligenstadt, near Mainz. His early trainingwas carried out probably in Cologne, where he would have beenexposed to the international style of Stefan Lochner (1400-1451).It is generally agreed that Memling, having arrived in the LowCountries in the late 1450s, spent a prolonged period in Brussels,in the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden (1399-1464), where he mayhave enjoyed journeyman status. There he completed his formation asa painter, thoroughly assimilating the artist’s style, techniqueand composition.

Following can der Weyden’s death in June 1464, Memling made the move north to Bruges, a thriving commercial center that was also a hub of international banking. The city had attracted painters of the importance of Jan van Eyck (1395-1441), who spent the last nine years of his life in Bruges, and Petrus Christus (1410-1475 or 1476), who worked there for 30 years and was the leading artistic personality at the time of Memling’s arrival. Memling was granted citizenship of the city in January 1465, and by the 1470s he was Bruges’s preeminent painter.

Memling was primarily engaged as a painter of devotional works for a variety of local and foreign patrons. While he never enrolled as a member of Bruges’s corporation of painters and was not employed by the Burgundian court, throughout his career he received prestigious commissions from religious institutions, trade guilds, foreign merchants and patrons and Flemish patricians. Although the final decade of his career was marked by political turmoil, domestic disturbance and economic instability, his practice still attracted important foreign commissions from Lubeck Cathedral and the Benedictine Abbey of Santa Maria la Real in Castile.

Memling’s last years were difficult ones: his wife, Tanne (or Anna) died in 1487, leaving him with three young children for whom to care. In this same year the city suffered violent upheaval following the accession to the throne of Maximilian of Austria, and plague further devastated Bruges in 1492. With its trading privileges lost to Antwerp, the city swiftly declined as a center of commerce and banking, but Memling seems to have been active until the end; his enormous retable of nine panels for the monastery church of Najera was dispatched to Castille in 1492. The artist died on August 11, 1494, and was buried in the cemetery of the church of Saint Giles (53 years earlier, van Eyck had been given the honor of burial within). Never forgetting his Rhenish origins, he endowed annual masses to be given in the Siligenstadt Church for “Henn Mommelings…citizen of Bruges in Flanders.”

The Frick Collection is at 1 East 70th Street. For information, www.frick.org or 212-288-0700.