Convent Bird’s-Eye-View
[GREY SISTERS OF ST ELIZABETH.]
‘Kloosten den grouwe Zusters in den ouden Zak.’ [Bruges?, c. 1835.]
Pen, watercolour, and wash drawing on thick wove paper, watermarked ‘J Whatman Turkey Mill 1835’, c. 470 x 620 mm, signed bottom right ‘Par J Gailliard’; one very small hole, some browning to edges; very good, in a modern paper mount.
A large and detailed bird’s-eye-view of the convent of the Grey Sisters of St Elizabeth on the Oude Zak in Bruges, depicting two of the convent’s nuns, its buildings, and grounds.
The Grey Sisters were regular Franciscan tertiaries who took their inspiration from St Elizabeth of Thuringia (1207–1231), who had devoted herself to the care of the sick and the poor.
Their convent on the Oude Zak was established in the fourteenth century and our drawing shows it as it must have appeared before its dissolution in 1796 in the wake of the French Revolution. The attractive brick Baroque church (no longer extant) is depicted twice, in artistic isolation viewed behind a tree and two nuns, delicately coloured, and again, viewed from the street, surrounded by the convent’s other buildings, rendered in grey wash. Of the two deep houses with stepped gables to the left of the church one survives. Beyond these lie courtyards, one containing fowl, and beyond them, the convent’s extensive gardens.
Our artist would appear to have been the historian of Bruges, Jean Jacques Gailliard (1801–1867). Inventaris Vlaanderen refers to a drawing of the Oude Zak convent by Jan Beerblock of c. 1796, and it seems likely that Gailliard’s handsome depiction is taken from this.