Portrait of Barbara van Vlaendenbergh

In Bruges around 1480 Hans Memling was the portraitist the city's rich merchants went to, and Barbara van Vlaendenbergh was married to one of the richest, Willem Moreel, a banker who twice served as the town's burgomaster. Memling painted the couple as a pair, husband and wife on separate panels that once flanked a central religious image, so the pious donors seemed to kneel before it. Barbara is shown half-length before a distant landscape, in a purple gown and a veiled headdress, her hands joined in prayer and jewelled rings on her fingers. A few years later, in 1484, the same couple commissioned Memling's large Moreel Triptych, in which their many children kneel in rows behind them.