ON 19 MAY 1425, an ambitious young artist secured his future career by becoming official painter and varlet de chambre to the glorious Duke of Burgundy. (The term varlet did not mean domestic servant in the sense of valet, but simply a member of the ducal household.) The Duke’s new employee was Jan van Eyck, aged thirty. Born in the southern Netherlands, possibly in the town of Maaseik, and trained, like his brothers, as a painter, van Eyck’s skills and industry had already won him a prestigious position as official painter to the cultured court of John, Duke of Bavaria, in The Hague, where he helped to decorate the palace. But Duke John – nicknamed ‘the Pitiless’ on account of his mass hangings of insurgents – died in January 1425, and civil war broke out between the rivals for the succession. Having lost his patron and his guaranteed source of income, van Eyck decided to take his chance in Flanders, where one brother of his may have already been working in Ghent. His growing reputation – and current availability – came to the attention of the most ambitious ruler in northern Europe, the Duke of Burgundy, who summoned him to Bruges.
Philip ‘the Good’ was the third Duke of Burgundy. The cognomen was not acquired until after his death, and it did not refer to his outstanding moral virtues, which were conspicuously lacking, but to a general nostalgia for the good old days and the lost golden age created by this most lavish and long-ruling of dukes. His father was John ‘the Fearless’, and his grandfather Philip ‘the Bold’. That first duke was a member of the French royal family, a younger son of King Jean II, who awarded him the Duchy of Burgundy, an ancient feudal territory in eastern France whose capital was Dijon. A judicious marriage to the heiress Margaret of Flanders brought the duke extensive lands in northern France and the southern Netherlands – the counties of Flanders, Brabant and Artois. The duchy therefore encompassed a group of disparate territories whose proud and independent citizens resisted the attempts by successive dukes to centralise power and weld them into a unified whole. Historians still debate whether the dukes of Burgundy saw themselves as princes of France or rulers of a genuinely autonomous state.
Fatal tensions were forged between duchy and kingdom in 1407 when Duke John the Fearless arranged the murder of the French king’s heir in order to advance his own claim to the throne. The new heir, the Dauphin, took terrible revenge by ordering John’s assassination during so-called peace talks between the two factions in 1419, bringing van Eyck’s patron, Philip the Good, to power at the age of twenty-three. The elegant Philip vowed to wear black for the rest of his life in eternal mourning for his father (this made the colour chic at court), and he thereafter viewed the French king as an enemy rather than an overlord. Philip shifted his power base from Burgundy to Flanders and made it the core of his sprawling duchy, which he extended still further by his policy of aggressive expansion, seizing the states of Holland and Zeeland. His itinerant court moved between Bruges, Brussels, Lille and Hesdin, with rarer visits to distant Dijon in what was still a fiefdom of France. Combining the exquisite taste of the French court with the prosperity of the industrious Low Countries, the Duchy of Burgundy developed a unique style and culture that made it the most sophisticated state in fifteenth-century Europe. For an ambitious young artist, it was the best place in the world.
Van Eyck’s new master was more of a monarch than a duke. According to Georges Chastellain, the official court historian (a completely new post, pioneered by the duke in order to record his triumphs for posterity), Philip ‘had a handsome figure,1 upright, strong in the arm and back and well-knit … he had the rather long face of his father and grandfather, brown and weather-beaten. The nose was long but not aquiline, his forehead was high and large … such looks and such a figure seemed more befitting an emperor or a king than an ordinary man.’ Miniature painters confirmed this description, giving him an excessively long face and a haughty, refined expression. The duke was fit and healthy too, skilled at archery, tennis and hunting. His only apparent vice was the sociable one of staying up ‘almost till dawn,2 turning night into day to watch dances, entertainments and other amusements’ while his many bastards, cheerfully acknowledged and supported, simply proved his fertility. Ironically, however, the duke’s three marriages only produced one legitimate son and heir.
Rogier van der Weyden, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy
Recruiting a talented painter like van Eyck proved how seriously Duke Philip took his public image. The role of a court artist was to glorify his lord and impress distinguished visitors by tackling all tasks fitted to his training and skills. van Eyck was not the only official artist, for the duke had craftsmen on hand in all his residences. At the castle of Hesdin, in Artois, he employed as varlet de chambre the artist Colard le Voleur, whose job it was in 1433 to repaint the gallery and restore some ancient mechanical figures and cunning devices which squirted water, soot or flour at unsuspecting visitors: the highlight was a gadget which wetted the ladies from underneath. Other special effects included thunder, lighting and snow, and a walking talking hermit made of wood. Colard ‘decorated the room3 in front of the hermit … in good quality oil colours of gold, azure, and so on … and he has done the whole ceiling and panelling of this room in azure strewn with large stars picked out in gold.’
In Lille, the duke’s artist was Hue de Boulogne, one of whose projects was to create table decorations for a particularly ostentatious banquet in 1435. The two top tables sported artificial hawthorn trees painted with gold and silver flowers, bearing the arms of all the nobles present, while a further eighteen trees flaunted the ducal arms. Hue also painted these onto fifty-six wooden plates and constructed ten gilt lions to surround the live peacock that was carried in on a huge platter (for decoration rather than eating). To enliven another feast at Lille in 1454, Colard le Voleur travelled from Hesdin to help make a two-headed horse, a pair of elephants and a naked woman who squirted hippocras (spiced wine) from her breasts. In the same year, when the duke was planning a crusade against the Turks in revenge for their devastating sack of Constantinople, his artist Jehan de Boulogne (perhaps Hue’s son) painted ducal emblems in gold onto damask standards and other military equipment.
Although the incomplete ducal accounts of the period do not list specific examples, these were the sort of tasks van Eyck might initially have been expected to undertake. He certainly accepted a decorative commission from the town councillors of Bruges to paint and gild eight of the statues of biblical and historical characters that garnished the florid exterior of the Stadthuis in the Burg, the political and religious heart of the town. However, the duke was soon impressed by van Eyck’s diplomatic as well as artistic skills, and dispatched him on a series of well-paid and evidently sensitive missions abroad; the accounts describe two of them as ‘secret’. Philip operated an extensive network of spies and messengers all over Europe, and van Eyck may have contributed to the information gathering by drawing plans or recording fortifications and weaponry in potentially hostile states. He created a mappa mundi, ‘a circular representation of the world …4 it is thought no work has been done more perfectly in our time; you may distinguish in it not only places and the lie of continents but also, by measurement, the distances between places’, according to the Italian scholar Bartolomeo Fazio, who saw the original in 1456.
In his official role as court painter, van Eyck joined the huge embassy that set off in 1428 to seek the hand of the Infanta Isabel, daughter of King John of Portugal: the duke had already lost two wives but still lacked an heir. van Eyck’s job was to make two portraits of the Infanta to be sent back to Flanders, one by land and one by sea in case the other got lost. It was unlikely that the marriage alliance depended on van Eyck’s enticing image of the bride-to-be (unlike the unfortunate example of Henry VIII, seduced by Holbein’s too flattering interpretation of Anne of Cleves). Isabel was a virgin of thirty-one, her rank as the daughter of a king outweighing her age. Commissioning her portrait was a mark of courtesy and a demonstration of the artistic resources of the duke’s court rather than a test of her beauty.
While the king and the duke’s men interminably negotiated terms and conditions, the extended stay in the Iberian peninsula enabled van Eyck to study landscapes and buildings that he could never have imagined in flat, foggy Flanders. The party visited Santiago de Compostela, Castile, Granada ‘and several other lords,5 countries and places’, travels which inspired, for example, the exotic, southern trees in the altarpiece van Eyck painted for St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent. Being on a mission that lasted for fourteen months also meant that the duke’s artist lived in intimate contact with leading members of the Burgundian court, the duke’s most trusted men. Among the distinguished ambassadors was Count Baudouin de Lannoy, old soldier and governor of Lille, whose craggy features van Eyck later immortalised.
Following a storm-tossed crossing of the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel which surely caused van Eyck to fear for his life and future career, the epic expedition culminated with the triumphal arrival of the bride in Flanders. The party reached Sluys, the seaport of Bruges, in December 1429, where they were greeted by celebrations designed to prove that the Burgundian court was the grandest in northern Europe. The orgy of ceremonies, processions and tournaments demonstrated how the duke had elevated his sturdy northern provinces to rival anything the Italian or French courts might offer. Growing prosperity had spawned luxury industries, while the ostentatious skills of the duke’s artists and craftsmen were as brilliantly evident as the materials they transformed.
Patronising the arts was also seen as proof of moral virtue. Duke Philip promoted poets and writers by acquiring and commissioning books to fill his library, which contained more than a thousand manuscripts illuminated by the very best masters; this was how he first became aware of van Eyck, who probably began his career as a talented miniature painter. The duke naturally possessed hundreds of tapestries, the most expensive art form of all, looked after by a dedicated keeper, another varlet de chambre. He also owned literally thousands of jewels, so many, according to an awed foreign visitor, ‘that the keeper6 of the jewels said he could not show them in three days. He told us his lord had so many jewels that he had not seen them all in many years and indeed did not know where they were.’ The same tourist noted the duke’s silver and gold plate, which outdid even the luxuries of Venice: ‘it is said that nowhere in the world were such costly treasures, if only because of the hundred-thousand pound weight of beaten gold and silver gilt vessels which we saw in many cabinets’. The duke took most of these prized possessions with him on his constant progresses from one palace to the next. A typical journey, when the court moved from Dijon to Lille in the spring of 1435, required seventy-two carts, each pulled by five or six sturdy horses. It took five carts to carry the duke’s jewels, and another two for those of the duchess. The tapestries occupied a further six.
Being employed by such a patron meant that van Eyck was entirely at the duke’s disposal, although he was permitted to undertake commissions for other clients. A major privilege was exemption from the niggling restrictions of guild regulations, and from local taxes. His annual salary was 100 livres, and he wore the duke’s livery. On joining the court in 1425, he had to move from Bruges to Lille, the duchy’s administrative centre, and the duke paid the costs of that move. For the next seven years, van Eyck lived in Lille (apart from the foreign trips and possible visits to Ghent to work on the massive altarpiece). Working for Philip was certainly profitable, although payment could be uncertain. In a bid to reduce household expenditure at the end of 1426, the duke cancelled several pensions and dismissed some servants, but unfortunately the Flanders receiver erroneously assumed the court painter’s salary was also to be stopped and it took more than a year following his complaints before it was resumed by special edict and all arrears paid. Six years later there was another financial hiatus when the duke most generously replaced the 100 livres annual salary with a life pension worth 4,320 livres, partly financed by taxes on the export of Flanders woollen cloth. The accountants at Lille, concerned that no reason had been given for such an enormous increase, declined to pay. van Eyck threatened to leave, forcing the duke to explain to his recalcitrant officials that he was about to use this particular employee on ‘certain great works’, no other artist of his ability was available and they must pay the pension without further argument or delay, or face his wrath.
In 1432, van Eyck moved back to Bruges, where the duke was now spending much of his time. The court occupied the old Princenhof palace, lavishly refitted to host the wedding celebrations, but the duke also had a second residence in Bruges, the hotel Vert, where he escaped from the formalities of court life. The newly enriched varlet de chambre, who did not have to live at court, acquired a property of his own, a combination of home and workshop, in the artisan heart of the vibrant city.