December 1495 we find the guardians of the three children of the marriage acting on their behalf in the local courts in the winding-up of their father’s estate, which at any rate proves that the eldest at that time must have been still a minor, or under the age of five-and-twenty. Apart from his wife’s dowry, of which we have no knowledge, Memlinc’s circumstances were then already much above the ordinary, for in 1480 out of the 247 wealthiest citizens only 140 were taxed at higher rates, and it is on record that in the same year he purchased a large stone house and two smaller adjacent ones on the east side of the main street that leads from the Flemish Bridge to the ramparts, in a quarter of the town much affected by artists, and within the Parish of Saint Giles, beneath the spreading trees of whose peaceful God’s acre he was to find an abiding resting-place some fourteen years later, by the side of his old friend the miniaturist William Vrelant, who predeceased him by some thirteen years, to be joined there in after years by many another eminent artist, such as John Prévost, Lancelot Blondeel, Peter Pourbus, and Antony Claeissens. That he was a busy man the record of works that have come down to us from this decade alone amply testifies. The “Saint John the Baptist,” in the Royal Gallery at Munich (1470); the exquisite little diptych “The Blessed Virgin and Child,” in the Louvre, painted (_c._ 1475) for John Du Celier, a member of the Guild of Merchant Grocers, whose father was a member of the Council of Flanders; the panel in the National Gallery, which we reproduce; the magnificent altarpiece in the Royal Museum at Turin painted for William Vrelant (1478); the famous triptych executed for the high altar of the church attached to the Hospital of Saint John at Bruges (1479); and the triptych “The Adoration of the Magi” presented to the Hospital by Brother John Floreins (1479), all belong to this period: while with the year 1480 are associated the portraits of William Moreel and his wife, in the Royal Gallery at Brussels; that of one of their daughters as the Sibyl Sambetha, in Saint John’s Hospital; the marvellous composition in the Royal Gallery at Munich, “Christ the Light of the World,” painted to the order of Peter Bultinc, a wealthy citizen of Bruges and a member of the Guild of Tanners; and the triptych “The Dead Christ mourned by His Mother,” in Saint John’s Hospital--let alone the numerous other works attributed to him but not authenticated or which have been lost. The bare record, however, conveys but a feeble idea of the immensity of the labour this output involved. [Illustration: PLATE V.--MARTIN VAN NIEUWENHOVE. The companion of the painting reproduced in Plate I., and is in the Hospital of Saint John.]