Retrato de um velho

This little panel, barely a foot high, is missing its other half. It was painted in Bruges around 1475, when Hans Memling was the city's most sought-after portraitist, and it once hinged to a matching portrait of an old woman, almost certainly the man's wife. That companion now hangs in Houston, a whole ocean away from him. The pairing was not a religious picture, the usual reason to fold two panels together. It was made for a plainer purpose. To keep the faces of an aging couple as they neared the end of their lives. Memling sets the man against a distant landscape, a device he took from his teacher Rogier van der Weyden that opened Flemish portraits up beyond a flat dark wall.