They were a strictly practical people whose painting of stuffs, furs, jewellery, and architecture was marvellously minute and veracious.

But they were not a handsome race, and their models for saints and virgins seem to have been the people that came handiest and by no means the best looking.

Thus the figures in their pictures lack personal charm, though the painting is usually full of vigour, truth, and skill.
When Flemings began to make tours in Italy and saw the pictures of Raphael, in whom grace was native, they fell in love with his work and returned to Flanders to try and paint as he did.

But to them grace was not God-given, and in their attempt to achieve it, their pictures became sentimental and postured, and the naive simplicity and everyday truth, so attractive in the works of the earlier school, perished.
The influence of the Van Eycks had not been confined to Flanders.
Artists in Germany had been profoundly affected.

They learnt the new technique of painting from the pupils of the Van Eycks in the fifteenth century.