W. H. James Weale was a leading scholar of early Netherlandish painting, and became Keeper of the National Art Library in 1890 aged 58 (successor of Robert Henry Soden Smith). He was described by Francis Haskell as having ‘long beem the doyen of the historians of early Flemish paintings’ (Francis Haskell: History and its Images, New Haven and London, 1993, p. 452) and he is now best known for his publications on Hans Memling (1901), Gerard David (1905) and Hubert and Jan van Eyck (1908). After a short career in teaching in 1855 Weale had moved to Bruges, where he became a champion of historic buildings at risk. Supplementing his private income as a dealer in antiquities, through his research in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century archives and publication of documentary sources Weales provided a foundation for the study of early Netherlandish art that still hold firm today. As with his predecessors in the Library, it was his background as an art historian, rather than as a librarian, that qualified him for the position and reflected the value placed on scholarship and on the Library’s curatorial collections. Weale immediately recognized the inconvenience of adding to the Universal Catalogue each time a new title was acquired, and so introduced a card-index system for the author catalogue, which survived until the library started to computerize in 1987. He also established standard rules for cataloguing books. His other great contribution was as a collector, his most noted acquisition being the French missal of 1350 that he identified as from St Denis in Paris. Weale became ‘the very type of the antiquary’, patriarchal in appearance, tall and lean with a full grey beard, bespectacled and shambling in his gait beneath sloping shoulders. In 1897 he was dismissed by the V&A’s director for speaking too frankly to a Government Selected Committee enquiring into the Museum’s Management. Nevertheless, the following year the Museum published his pioneering catalogue and his history of bookbinding (W.H.J. Weale, Bookbindings and Rubbings of Bindings in the National Art Library, South Kensington Museum, London 1898).