NAPOLEON SAID OF his brothers, ‘They are nothing1 without me; they are great men only because I have made them great.’ No one would have regarded his brother Joseph as a great man. He was well-meaning, considerate and cultivated (he collected art and wrote a novel, Moina, the Peasant Girl of Mont Cenis), but he was not up to the daunting responsibilities Napoleon imposed upon him of becoming King of Spain, running the country and commanding the army of occupation. This was deliberate. Though Napoleon despised his greedy, pliant family, he knew he could command their self-interested loyalty and therefore dominate them more than any ambitious outsider.
Joseph was the eldest, Napoleon’s senior by nineteen months. They were said to be close during childhood, but the younger, tiny, driven man envied his big brother’s charm and confidence and in the end controlled him like a puppet. After Napoleon made him French ambassador to Rome, Joseph began his career as a collector by allegedly looting artworks from the Pope. These were all lost at sea. After conquering Italy, Napoleon appointed Joseph King of Naples, where he ruled happily for two years, becoming a keen patron of the arts and presiding over a languid and luxurious court. But after Napoleon sent his troops into the country of his ally, Spain, purportedly to tackle the threat from their mutual enemies, Portugal and England, his intervention in the succession crisis between Carlos IV and his son Ferdinand resulted in the king’s abdication in 1808 and the heir’s flight into exile that year. So Napoleon filled the vacancy with the reluctant Joseph, who as new King of Spain became the owner of the royal art collections in Madrid and elsewhere, including the van Eyck double portrait.
Imposed as the ruler of a country under military occupation, Joseph was in an impossible situation. The Spaniards called him il re intruso, the uninvited king. More coarsely, they nicknamed him ‘Pepe Bottles’ because of his drinking habits. (Lady Holland, on a second visit in 1809, also referred to him disrespectfully as ‘King Pepe’.) He depended for such powers as he possessed on the presence of some 200,000 French soldiers and the backing of Napoleon’s generals, who despised Joseph because, although nominally head of the army of occupation, he was only an amateur soldier. Yet he wished his reluctant subjects well, and was genuinely torn between defending French or Spanish interests.
Robert Lefevre, Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain
Joseph’s dilemma was epitomised by his attempts to protect Spain’s artistic heritage from the official acquisitions policy of Napoleon and Denon, and other more established predators. An 1810 memorandum compiled by the Spanish Academy of Madrid complained of how the French surpassed even the English in the illegal export of artworks. One of the greediest was Marshal Soult, Joseph’s own chief of staff and governor of Andalucia, who formed a magnificent art collection as a result of his service in the Peninsula. English dealers also took advantage of the opportunities for snapping up neglected masterpieces there. The most persistent and successful was William Buchanan, who sent out an agent in 1807 ‘with a view to acquiring2 some of those works of art which war and revolution invariably cause to change masters’. He learned not only that the French ‘generals made little scruple in selecting from the convents many of the finest works of the great masters’ but that ‘many fine things3 are in the possession of the old noble families and are very little regarded’.
Joseph tried to retaliate by reinforcing the art export ban. The most serious threat, however, was the arrival of Denon himself in November 1808, on an official mission to acquire paintings from the Flemish and Spanish schools for the Musée Napoléon; he had already lamented to Napoleon that the museum had so few Spanish artists. Murillo was the most sought-after name, but Velázquez was also starting to be appreciated.
Napoleon himself came in January 1809, when he reminded Joseph of their requirements:
I wrote to advise you4 to make your entry into Madrid on the 14th. Denon is anxious for some pictures. I wish you to seize all that you can find in the confiscated houses and suppressed convents, and to make me a present of 50 masterpieces which I want for the Museum in Paris. At some future time I will give you others in their places. Consult Denon for this purpose. He may make proposals to you. You are aware that I want only what is good, and it is supposed that you are richly provided.
More ominously, Napoleon commanded his brother to place cannons and mortars in the Buen Retiro palace, still home to some royal art: ‘This measure5 will make the inhabitants manageable and docile, which will be an incalculable advantage to everybody.’
So successfully did Joseph drag his feet over presenting these fifty ‘masterpieces’ that not one reached Paris for four years. He managed to stand up to his brother without actually disobeying him, and was determined to protect his new subjects’ heritage from French greed. Spanish mañana may also have played a role. Denon’s correspondence reveals growing exasperation at the time lost and the burgeoning costs. In July 1813 he referred to the imminent arrival in Paris of the fifty paintings and the expenses for packing and transporting six crates of art from Madrid to Bayonne – insurance, feeding horses for twenty days, plus the unexpected cost of compensation for a horse shot dead by insurgents. And when the works arrived, he decided they were not good enough to display and complained that Joseph had been deceived. Joseph was deceiving him.
To prevent his brother from demanding any more works, Joseph issued a decree in December 1809 that announced his intention to establish a national art gallery in the elegant Prado building begun by Carlos III. It would be called the Museo Josefino, and would be Spain’s version of the Musée Napoléon. This was a clever way of complying with Napoleon’s policy of establishing centres of art throughout the whole empire, while also commemorating himself as a great benefactor. So he began to gather suitable works of art from the royal palaces, the dissolved monasteries, and anywhere that he chose: he even seized some Murillos from the city of Seville when it refused to make him a loan. As the Prado was still being used as a cavalry headquarters, Joseph’s acquisitions were stored in conditions which the Madrid Academy later deplored: ‘three years in a humid location6 where there is danger that the objects will deteriorate and be destroyed … many valuable pictures are without stretchers … detached canvases piled up one on top of another in which state they are exposed to harm’.
Van Eyck had a firm place in this grandiose scheme. The 1794 inventory of the royal art collection served as a basis for Joseph and his advisers. With the renewed interest in Flemish art, a van Eyck in Madrid was again a status symbol, as were the other Netherlandish paintings that Marie of Hungary brought to Spain and Philip II purchased. Joseph probably had the double portrait removed from the palace’s domestic quarters and added in some storeroom to the growing pile of exhibits intended to grace the walls of his future Museo Josefino. For this purpose, he emptied the Escorial. A visitor there in 1812 noted that ‘the splendid gallery7 containing the noblest specimens of the Italian and Spanish schools, all had vanished. The Madonnas of Rafaelle, the Sebastian del Piombo, the Venus of Velázquez no longer graced its walls. The mausoleum of the royal family alone remained perfect [despite] the wantonness of French spoliation.’
Joseph’s grand ambitions came to nothing because the English, Portuguese and Spanish armies gradually forced the French to retreat. Wellington’s forces temporarily occupied Madrid in the summer of 1812, and Joseph fled, only returning after Marshal Soult retook it for the French in December. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow that winter made him recall many troops from Spain in order to boost the gravely depleted grand army. Among those he summoned was Soult, who returned to Paris in March 1813, ‘taking with him8 a large number of valuables which he had brought from Andalucia’, according to Count Miot de Melito, head of Joseph’s household, and an eyewitness to the disintegration of French rule. These valuables included an impressive collection of paintings by Murillo and Velázquez, which Soult had seized from churches or private houses in Seville in compensation for civilian attacks on his men. Others who demonstrated the ineffectiveness of Joseph’s art export ban included General Sebastiani and Monsieur de Crochant, paymaster-general to the French army in Spain: the magnificent art collections they amassed were later sold by the London dealer Buchanan, who had also built up a fine stock of his own.
It was obvious that French days in Spain were numbered. In January 1813, Napoleon ordered Joseph to evacuate Madrid and establish new headquarters in Valladolid, with the aim of controlling northern Spain only. The uninvited king decided to evacuate much of the royal art collection as well and annoyed his brother by delaying his departure until the middle of March. No doubt he was slowed down by the need to organise the removal of his treasures, as well as of his staff and all their possessions. It was only now that he took the final steps for sending the fifty masterpieces he had promised Denon in 1809, ultimate proof of his delaying tactics. He followed this, however, with an even larger batch of artworks for the Musée Napoléon, twenty-three chests containing at least 250 paintings, many of which came from the royal palaces and hunting lodges. These did not reach Paris until September, when Denon complained that their transport had cost almost 25,000 francs, but that only six were good enough to hang in the museum. The reason for their relatively poor quality was that Joseph had kept the best for himself. When he abandoned Madrid, on 17 March 1813, the royal baggage train carried a stack of canvases by Raphael, Titian and Velázquez which Joseph intended for his chateau in France. He also took the van Eyck.
Although he was meant to be in charge of the three French armies in Spain, their commanders refused to liaise with him, nor would Napoleon communicate with him directly any longer. The emperor blamed his brother for the retreat, believing, he said, that ‘all the blunders9 in Spain stem from my ill-advised kindness to the King who, besides not knowing how to command an army, is in addition incapable of judging his own abilities accurately, and of leaving the command to a soldier’. Couriers took two to three weeks to travel between Paris and Valladolid, if their messages ever got through at all, so Napoleon’s stream of instructions and Joseph’s defensive replies were seldom relevant. As Wellington neared Madrid, Napoleon ordered the total evacuation of the area, and all remaining troops and a huge column of refugees departed north. These included French civilians and Spanish collaborators; the old aristocracy had removed themselves but Joseph’s glitzy court had attracted a new crowd of arrivistes and hangers-on. Joseph waited for the convoy to reach Valladolid in early June, before setting off for the French border, his soldiers almost outnumbered by some 20,000 refugees travelling with 3,000 wagons of possessions.
Among the Madrid evacuees was Andrew Leith-Hay, a young British soldier whom the French had captured earlier in the year and imprisoned in the Buen Retiro palace after interrogation by Marshal Soult, a man of ‘neither a gentlemanlike10 nor soldierly appearance … a parvenu of the vulgarest and lowest description,’ according to Leith-Hay. On 27 May, the hostage joined a convoy of ‘persons of rank,11 quantities of carriages, cars, wagons or laden mules … Accompanying the Army of the South, numerous ladies, dressed en militaire and on horseback, having forsaken the plains of Andalucia, followed the fortunes of their Gallic lovers … the assemblage was motley in the extreme, nor could it be doubted that habits of luxury … had to a great degree encumbered the French armies.’
On the evening of 19 June 1813, they reached the town of Vitoria, set in an undulating plain between the river Zadorra and the foothills of the Pyrenees; this was an important junction bisected by the main road to Bayonne, the nearest town over the French border. Despite dreadful overcrowding, Joseph intended to stay there for some time while he awaited the cavalry reinforcements he believed, mistakenly, to be approaching. There was a strange atmosphere of festivity: Leith-Hay noted that ‘at night, Vitoria12 was illuminated in honour of the soi-disant king’. However, Joseph and his commander-in-chief General Jourdan had underestimated the proximity and the size of Wellington’s forces, which included a large component of flexible cavalry. Joseph had never planned to stand and fight at Vitoria and all troop movements were severely hampered by the chaos of the accompanying refugees who blocked all the roads. They even immobilised some of the guns by commandeering artillery horses to drag their luggage carts. Heavy rain fell on 19 June, causing appalling conditions underfoot.
The following day, a day of light showers, Joseph learned that it was too late for flight because the English, Portuguese and Spanish troops, whom he had assumed would only attack from the west, had nearly encircled the town. The only escape route was north-east, the high road to France, but time was running out. At 2 a.m. on 21 June, Joseph dispatched a large convoy of baggage towards the frontier. This contained some of the stolen works of art and other treasures from Madrid, and was escorted by an infantry division which he could hardly spare. (This convoy did reach France, bringing the paintings that so disappointed Denon.)
Joseph and General Jourdan prepared to face the enemy, who started their advance at 8 a.m. Ironically, the weather had improved. ‘The nature of the ground13 and the fine day gave it truly the appearance of one of those pictures of a battle drawn from fancy,’ as one British cavalry officer reminisced. The cavalry won the day. The French, outflanked and outnumbered, realised by the middle of the afternoon that they had lost and that the allies were almost upon them. This caused panic among the refugee train. As William Napier, general and historian of the Peninsular War, described it, ‘beyond the city,14 thousands of carriages and animals and non-combatants, men, women and children were crowding together in all the madness of terror. And as the English shot went booming overhead, the vast crowd started and swerved with a convulsive movement, while a dull and horrid sound of distress arose … it was the wreck of a nation.’
Joseph gave orders to retreat. The 10th Hussars charged his fleeing party and nearly captured him but were fought off by his own light horse guards. Joseph leapt from his carriage and escaped on horseback over the fields. The desperate French – both soldiers and terrified civilians (one French officer described the camp followers as a mobile brothel) – headed for the only way of escape, a narrow road to the east which at once became a solid traffic jam. Count Miot de Melito, accompanying Joseph, reported how they left the battlefield but ‘both the road15 and the plain that it crosses were obstructed by the great park of artillery – men were spiking the guns – by a train of wagons and treasure chests, containing several millions in coinage which had been left open for all, by the king’s carriages ready for starting, by those belonging to the generals and heads of the military administration and by quantities of luggage of all kinds’.
The baggage train saved the French, for many British troops got distracted from pursuit by plundering the convoy: ‘The fortunes amassed16 by generals, officers and civilians during five years of warfare, plunder and extortion were all abandoned and became the prize of the conqueror … the ardour of the enemy to seize on the splendid booty within their reach saved the French army from destruction.’ Somewhere among the chaos, in one of the abandoned carriages of the king’s train, was the van Eyck portrait.
The previous day the hostage Leith-Hay had been exchanged for a French captive, having promised in a gentlemanly way not to fight in the imminent battle. He now contemplated the aftermath:
Such a scene17 as the town presented has been seldom seen … Its inhabitants and others had commenced, diligently commenced, the work of pillage … To the accumulated plunder of Andalucia were added the collections made by other armies, the personal luggage of the king, fourgons [carriages] having inscribed upon them in large characters ‘Property of His Majesty the Emperor’, wagons of every description and a military chest containing a large sum recently received from France for payment of the troops, but which had not yet been distributed; jewels, pictures, embroidery, silks, everything that was costly and portable … Removed from their frames and rolled up, some of the finest Italian pictures from the royal collection were found in the Imperials [roof compartments] of Joseph Bonaparte’s carriage.
The van Eyck was painted on wood, not canvas, so of course it could not have been rolled up. But its dimensions were relatively small: taken out of its frame, it measured only 82 x 60 centimetres and would easily have fitted in a crate.
The triumphant allied troops indulged in an orgy of looting. The chest from Joseph’s carriage had contained 5 million francs sent by Napoleon to pay the army, but the money melted like snow. Wellington, according to one officer’s account, only managed to retrieve a fraction of the money after he set a squad of hussars to guard Joseph’s abandoned possessions.
The moment that18 our brave fellows got possession of the enemy’s baggage, all was riot – the army chest was forced and the men began to load themselves with bullion. To stop them was impossible. Some of the officers reported to the General that the men were plundering and carrying off the money. ‘Let them,’ was his answer, ‘they have fought well and deserve all they can find, were it ten times more.’
Wellington posted soldiers to prevent the looting of Vitoria itself, but anything abandoned by the enemy on the field of battle was fair game. Soldiers stuffed their pockets and haversacks with handfuls of dollars (Spanish silver coins used universally) and doubloons, and seized clothes, lace, jewellery, watches and every kind of personal luxury from the luggage of the French.
Joseph’s abandoned possessions were the main target, although the looters missed some of the artworks. Wellington wrote to his brother: ‘The baggage of King Joseph19 after the battle of Vitoria fell into my hands, after having been plundered by the soldiers; and I found among it an Imperial containing prints, drawings and pictures.’ Another old soldier described how ‘soldiers were stripping20 the carriage even of its lining in search of something portable … [including] great bundles of papers, charts, pictures of great value …’ Even Joseph’s travelling chamber pot – pure silver, and a gift from Napoleon – became a trophy of war for the 14th Light Dragoons, giving rise to their nickname, ‘the Emperor’s Chambermaids’. It is still used to serve champagne in their mess on special occasions. The looters were delighted by the king’s finest linen ‘unmentionables’ and his white silk stockings, embroidered with a scarlet ‘J’ surmounted by a crown.
That evening, the soldiers were intoxicated with relief and with the wine and brandy they had liberated from the well-stocked French – they even consumed tins of fowl in aspic from Joseph’s catering wagon. Having advanced 400 miles in forty days, they had not eaten bread for days, and had fought the battle on almost empty stomachs. Now they were replete. This led to orgiastic scenes where British soldiers dressed up in French officers’ uniforms, while others ‘attired themselves21 in female dresses richly embroidered in gold and silver’, according to Private Wheeler of the 51st Foot. The camp became an exotic bazaar where the looted goods were piled on wagons and sold to the highest bidder. In theory, officers and men were not meant to plunder (obviously they did) because anything seized from the enemy was supposed to be sold and the profits distributed fairly amongst each troop. That was what had happened, though on a much smaller scale, after the battles of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo.
Another veteran recalled, ‘It was not generally22 a night of repose. There was a grand auction on the camp of every brigade … the great variety of articles was far beyond anything ever heard of … plunder accumulated for years, torn with rapacious and unsparing hands from almost every province in Spain … silks, jewellery, plate and embroidery, mingled in strange disorder’. Wheeler also remembered the events of the jubilant night: ‘When I left23 no fires had been lit, now the place was all in a blaze. I know of nothing to compare it to but an Arab camp after a successful attack on some rich caravan. Now the camp represented a great fair and the money and goods soon became more equally distributed. “Who will give fifty dollars [Spanish silver coins] for this pipe? Here is a portrait of Napoleon for 100 dollars.”’
Amongst those auctioned watches and hats, parrots and monkeys, trinkets, ornaments and pictures, a small painting that had come from the baggage of ‘King Joe’ (as the British soldiers called him) might have caught the eye of an exhausted but exhilarated cavalry officer, who snapped it up as the souvenir of an extraordinary day which heralded the liberation of Spain and the beginning of the end of Napoleon.
THE FIXTURES AND fittings of the room also confirm the Arnolfinis’ wealth. The window has glass in it, yet another luxury when most people made do with shutters to keep out the cold, the wind and the rain.fn1 The upper third of the window is glazed with square panels filled with glass roundels held together in a frame of lead, an elegant and sophisticated feature emulating the most ostentatious buildings of early fifteenth-century Venice, home of glass technology. The embellishments of the Ca d’Oro, the ‘golden house’ built for the Contarini family in the 1420s, included external walls painted in gold and aquamarine, and windows filled with glass roundels imitating those recently installed to illuminate the vast council room in the newly built extension to the Doge’s Palace. Any Bruges-based Italian patron of van Eyck would have known such models.
This fashionable form of glazing used circular pieces of glass called ‘bull’s eyes’ or ‘crown glass’, made by spinning a dollop of molten glass on a rod so rapidly that the centrifugal force turned it into a hardened disc with an indented centre where the glass had touched the rod. The density and texture of crown glass made it an ornamental and highly effective window filler, for it let in the light but also modified its transparency and controlled the sun’s dazzle (more of a problem in Venice than in Bruges) by blurring but not obscuring the outside world.
These qualities fascinated van Eyck. He painted crown glass windows again and again, inserting them in all his paintings of the Madonna in an interior, whether for church or secular setting. At the same time, glass had undoubted Christian symbolism. While stained glass in churches represented the Light of God and the gemstones of the Heavenly City of Jerusalem, clear glass was a specific metaphor for the Immaculate Conception of Mary and for her virginity. Twelfth-century theologian St Bernard of Clairvaux pointed out how a sunbeam could penetrate glass while leaving it perfectly intact, and St Fulgentius compared the Virgin to a window through which the spirit of God passed to earth. van Eyck’s Madonna windows consisted of panels of roundels arranged in a standard pattern which, like the furniture and the rug, he also used for the Arnolfinis’ room. Their window contains six panels (three on each side), and each holds nine roundels, interspersed with four-lobed leafy shapes in light green glass in the awkwardly shaped spaces between them. The panels are surrounded by an outer frame composed of alternating strips of red, blue and geometrically painted glass, which would cast luminous patterns on the floorboards when the sun shone; there was also a narrow strip of yellowish glass between the window and the wall. The very specific details of the frame might suggest that van Eyck had an actual window in mind, perhaps from one of the Duke of Burgundy’s comfortable residences (there were identical coloured strips around the windows in St Jerome in his Study). The whole window looks thoroughly convincing even though it may never have cast light on that particular set of furniture.
The window has wooden shutters, divided into three tiers for greater control of the light, and held in place, when closed, by a latch in the central mullion. Such shutters were typical of a domestic interior, as if to stress, for once, the purely secular context. There are no shutters in any of van Eyck’s Madonna paintings, but he painted an identical pair in the Woman at her Toilette, whose room echoes that of the Arnolfinis down to the orange on the sill and the storage chest below the window.
fn1 In 1486, George Cely, an English merchant visiting Bruges, paid a 3-shilling supplement for the indulgence of a glass window in his room in the inn of the Sheep’s Hoof. (Hanham, 219)