It was but a passing phase. As in the days of the French Terror men who before had been peaceful citizens, carried away by the fury around them, committed all kinds of excesses, and when the blizzard had passed stepped quietly back into the old humdrum groove of former days as if nothing had happened, so David, under similar circumstances, defiled his brush by painting one loathsome picture, and presently, when the storm had spent itself, clothed and in his right mind, again resumed his old themes and his old methods: busied himself in adorning altars with fair virgins and sweet-faced angels, and by making breviaries beautiful with the legends of the saints. From the little that is recorded of him he seems to have been a devout and charitable man, and the placid scenes he delighted to paint indicate that he was naturally of a humane and gentle disposition. We know that in 1508 he joined the brotherhood of Our Lady of the Dry Tree, a famous religious guild affiliated to the Franciscan order. The following year he presented to the Carmelite nuns of Bruges one of his most exquisite pictures, an altar-piece representing Our Lady surrounded by virgin saints, at present in the gallery at Rouen; and later on, when the same nuns were in straitened circumstances, he advanced them a very considerable sum free of interest, only stipulating that the money should be returned when he asked for it. This he did during his last illness, several years afterwards, and it is pleasing to find that the nuns at once complied with his request. But to return to the days of his aberration. Shortly after the execution of Peter Lanchals and other members of the magistracy of Bruges, who like him had been accused of corruption and of conspiring with Maximilian to deprive the town of its liberty, the new magistrates whom the people had chosen to fill their place commissioned Gerard David to paint for the Court of Justice in the Hôtel de Ville two pictures which should remind the judges that if they should at any time fail in their duty punishment would assuredly follow. Gerard was a native of Oudewater in Holland, who some four years previously had taken up his abode in Bruges. On the 14th of January 1484 he was enrolled among the members of the Guild of St. Luke. He was probably an ardent patriot, at all events was in touch with the popular leaders, for we know from documentary evidence that they employed him to paint the iron gratings which were placed before the windows of Jean de Gros's mansion when Maximilian was imprisoned there, and, as we have seen, it was he whom they commissioned to paint the panels for the Town Hall.