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This essay focuses on the exhibition, Les Primitifs Flamands, which took place in Bruges in 1902. One of the earliest temporary loan exhibitions to have had international impact, it stimulated the first wave of scholarly interest in northern painting. Indeed, though early Netherlandish painters, such as Jan van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, had been lauded during their own lifetimes, a classical and Italian Renaissance ideal came to dominate the artistic canon of the academy as well as the historical narrative proposed with the emergence of the public museum. The many reviews of this exhibition allow us to track changing attitudes toward style and authorship while the taste for northern art in the broad sense was coming to the fore. Also important are issues of nationalism and nomenclature as the Flamands and the Primitifs of the exhibition’s title are further explored.