Few museums in the world today can boast the illustrious names of both Van Eyck and Bruegel in the tite of a catalogue of their own collection. Yet many will have heard these names in combination before. In 1921, a book was published caled Van Eyk bis Bruegel. Studien zur Geschichte der niederlandischen Malerei. The work was compiled by the Berlin art historian Max J. Friedlander, a pioneer of studies in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting. His fourteen-volume Die Altniederlandische Malerei, which appeared between 1924 and 1937, has remained a seminal work on the early masters to this day. The structure of the Boymans-van Beuningen catalogue is based on Friedlander's standard work.