Saint John the Baptist

In 1812 this narrow panel was in Rome, in the collection of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's younger brother, and it was engraved there as a work by Jan van Eyck. Lucien had probably bought the altarpiece it came from in Italy, and by then it had most likely been sawn up into five separate pictures. When his pictures were offered for sale in London in 1815 and again in 1816, this saint was still catalogued as a Van Eyck. The name Memling was only attached in 1824, by the German collector Sulpice Boisserée, who saw the panel in the home of the Prince of Orange, later King William II of the Netherlands. John stands barefoot in a coarse brown garment tied at the waist, one finger raised, with a castle on the hill behind him and small figures gathered at the river below.