THERE IS NO proof that the auctioning of looted goods is how the van Eyck portrait came into the hands of Lieutenant-Colonel James Hay of the 16th Light Dragoons (no relation to Leith-Hay). But the circumstantial evidence is very strong. The baggage that Joseph Bonaparte abandoned at Vitoria contained paintings from the royal palace in Madrid, where the van Eyck was last recorded; before Wellington had time to put a guard on it, British soldiers plundered much of the baggage and distributed its contents amongst themselves; James Hay, the next recorded owner of the painting, fought at the battle of Vitoria.
Hay was a Scot, from Braco, Banffshire, the son of an officer of the Cameron Highlanders, and a soldier all his life. When the Peninsular campaign began, he was a captain in the 16th Light Dragoons. The 16th was one of the finest of the light cavalry regiments, an elite troop of dashing young men who aimed to spend as much time hunting and dancing as serving in the field – Wellington complained that his cavalry pursued the enemy as recklessly as if they were chasing the fox. (In his novel Brigadier Gerard, Arthur Conan Doyle created a typical gambling, aristocratic member of the 16th Light Dragoons.) Promotion through the ranks often depended on family wealth, and Hay’s commission probably resulted from money and contacts as much as military dedication. However, the Peninsular wars honed many latent skills, and the recollections of cavalry officers and foot soldiers alike reveal exceptional courage combined with the stoical endurance of constant hardship.
Hay fought bravely. He was mentioned in dispatches following operations at El Bodon in September 1811, when he captured a French colonel and took seventy-nine prisoners. In January the following year he was promoted major, and in February 1813 lieutenant-colonel. At Vitoria, the 16th Light Dragoons made a significant contribution to the allied victory by approaching from the north-east as part of the pincer movement that undid the French. Hay was awarded a Gold Medal for his conduct that day. So he would have been more than justified in participating with his men in the wild celebrations of the evening. For a lieutenant-colonel, buying a painting in the jubilant auction of the enemy’s goods was more seemly than dressing up in a Frenchwoman’s gown.
In the months after the battle, the allies slowly pushed the French out of Spain in the ‘battles of the Pyrenees’, then crossed the border themselves. The 16th Light Dragoons fought in the winter battles of Nivelle and the Nive, where Hay was awarded a second Gold and a third Silver Medal. He had reached Toulouse in April 1814 when news came of Napoleon’s abdication and the end of the war.
If Hay had acquired the van Eyck at Vitoria, he would have had to look after it until his regiment returned to England almost a year later, in July 1814. It could have remained in his baggage, in the care of his servants, being marched through mountain passes, across rivers, and enduring the rain, ice and snow of that awful winter. Wellington’s divisions were supported by huge baggage trains, a provision which he protested was overgenerous, and he complained that officers even commandeered army horses to transport their lavish personal possessions. But it was clear that this perfectly adequate allowance was being disgracefully exceeded. Hay and his fellow officers took huge amounts of kit. They travelled with fishing rods, hunting guns and even hounds in order to maintain the traditional leisure pursuits of their class in the breaks from campaigning.
It was more likely that Hay shipped the painting, and other homeward-bound goods, to England in the care of a colleague sent back to recover from wounds or to join the home staff. There were frequent movements of this kind from the north-east Spanish ports. His own Major-General Anson sailed for England after Vitoria in July 1813, and his colleague, the gallant spy Captain Tomkinson, left for Spithead that September.
After they returned from Spain, the 16th Light Dragoons were in quarters at Hounslow and Hampton Court during the autumn of 1814. Here they resumed conventional peacetime duties, being posted in late March 1815 to ‘the neighbourhood of1 Westminster Bridge for the purpose of being in readiness for the riots occasioned by the passing of the Corn Laws’, as Tomkinson put it. That role became redundant in the face of a much greater threat: ‘During our stay there Napoleon entered France from Elba and placed himself again on the throne. Immediately on this account arriving in London, all disturbances about the Corn Laws ceased and the 16th returned to Hounslow to prepare for embarkation to the Netherlands’ under Lieutenant-Colonel Hay.
William Salter, Colonel James Hay
At first, it was almost like a holiday. Hay and his fellow officers visited museums and churches (suggesting an interest in Flemish art and architecture), and he took his men to inspect the historic site of Marlborough’s victory at Oudenarde, where he quizzed his adjutant John Luard about the cavalry’s function in that battle. They gratefully compared their relatively luxurious conditions, with decent accommodation, good food and cheap wine, to the severity of the Peninsular campaign. But Napoleon moved faster than the allies had believed possible, and by mid-June was threatening Brussels. News of this reached the camp at Enghien, where the 16th were waiting. At 5.00 a.m. in the morning of 16 June, Hay commanded his adjutant to assemble the regiment, breakfasted on bacon and eggs, then summoned his senior officers (some of whom had been up all night at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball) to march to Quatre Bras, where Napoleon had just defeated the Prussian allies. Wellington moved to confront Napoleon by the village of Waterloo, 10 miles south of Brussels, on the evening of 17 June 1815. After a wet, cold night, when the 16th had to sleep on the ground rolled up in their soaking cloaks, battle commenced.
The 16th were posted on the allied left, and were sent in to rescue another cavalry brigade which had charged too far in pursuit of retreating French infantry, had become scattered and were being attacked by enemy cavalry. According to Tomkinson’s account of the battle: ‘On moving to support them,2 we had to cross a deep lane, which broke us and occasioned some confusion; we however got forward as quickly as possible, charged and repulsed a body of Lancers in pursuit of a party of the Scottish Greys. Lieutenant-Colonel Hay was shot through the body. The shot entered his back coming out in front. It was, at the time, supposed he could not live.’ Tomkinson realised that Hay probably ‘was shot by our own infantry firing to check the enemy, and not perceiving our advance to charge’. Hay’s adjutant, Lieutenant John Luard, describing the horrors of the battle, said, ‘Colonel Hay fell3 desperately and dangerously wounded … the fire now became tremendous, particularly of musketry. I had at this moment my horse shot in the head by a musket ball and Lt Phillips had his head shot off by a cannon ball.’
Assumed mortally wounded, Hay was carried off the field, and removed with all the other gravely injured officers to farmhouses and cottages next to the battlefield on whose doors were chalked the names of the wounded. Here, on the point of death, he was visited a few days later by a young Scottish relative, Captain William Hay of the 12th Light Dragoons, who was checking up on his unit’s wounded men and horses at Waterloo and Brussels. ‘At the extreme end4 of the village of Waterloo I still found the wounded in hundreds, without any covering from the strong sun, lying on every spare space of ground.’ Officers however were in ‘little wretched cottages’ at the end of the village. Having visited his own injured colonel:
I next went to see, at a house opposite, Colonel Hay of the 16th, who was also very badly wounded. His medical man immediately told me there was not the slightest hope of his recovery, that he was free from pain, and I might go in and see him. I found him propped up with pillows in his bed, quite light-hearted, happy and truly like a soldier, perfectly prepared to die. He conversed on the subject of the action as coolly as a man untouched and said he was quite aware the nature of his wounds was such as to deprive him of any chance of life; asked about all his friends, and how his regiment had conducted itself after he fell; and lastly, that he was particularly glad to see me … and then took, as he considered, his last kind and affectionate leave of me. But, I am truly happy to say, both he and his doctor were far out in their calculations, as, instead of dying, he recovered rapidly.
The Supplement to the London Gazette for 3 July 1815 published Wellington’s dispatch of the returns of those killed and wounded at Waterloo, and listed Hay as ‘severely wounded’. But, having confounded his doctor, he was moved after eight days to Brussels where, according to his kinsman William Hay, ‘almost every private house5 had been converted into a receptacle for the wounded soldiers – and, to their everlasting credit, I found not only the whole of the rooms in the houses of the best families occupied by the men of the British Army, but the ladies of the houses attending and dressing their wounds and nursing them like their own children … too great praise cannot be bestowed on the citizens of Brussels, for their great attention and kindness on that occasion.’
The subsequent story was that during his stay in one of these hospitable residences, James Hay spotted the van Eyck portrait hanging in his room. ‘During his long convalescence,6 it attracted his attention several times: he admired it so much that in the end, he acquired it from the owner.’ This was the version that Belgian art dealer Chrétien-Jean Nieuwenhuys published nearly twenty years later at a time when he was busy marketing the increasingly fashionable Flemish ‘primitives’, whose greatest star was van Eyck. Yet it is very hard to explain how the painting had been moved from Madrid, where it was in 1799, to Brussels. And there is, too, the fact that, after Waterloo, Hay was a war hero who could get away with anything, including perhaps not telling the truth.
One reason why Nieuwenhuys claimed that Hay acquired the painting in Brussels rather than at Vitoria two years earlier was that after Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, Louis XVIII pledged that all works of art seized by the French should be restored to the countries from which they had been removed. So the van Eyck should logically have been returned to its rightful owner, Ferdinand VII, the reinstated King of Spain. To complicate matters further, a grateful Spanish nation subsequently presented to Wellington the paintings that he had rescued from Joseph Bonaparte’s baggage. So if Hay had admitted obtaining the van Eyck at Vitoria, he would have been depriving not only the King of Spain but his own commander the great duke, the most popular man in Britain.
Restoring stolen artworks was easier in theory than in practice. Some French provincial museums managed to retain their illegal acquisitions because the works were simply too large or fragile to be moved again, quite apart from the question of who would accept liability for the costs. However, Spain successfully reclaimed the collection that Joseph had sent to Paris, and although many were in very poor condition, they formed the core of the Prado art gallery that Ferdinand opened in Madrid in 1819, thus ultimately fulfilling Joseph’s intention. Many French people retained their contemptuous attitudes to Spaniards for a long time: as late as 1830, the art critic and inspector of ancient monuments Prosper Mérimée was still bemoaning the works that had got away: ‘I find instead that the French were wrong to leave behind [in Spain] so many artistic treasures that are often not appreciated for their real value by their legitimate owners.’ And he illogically criticised the British for hiding Spanish works of art: ‘How many masterpieces7 went to enrich the collections, more or less inaccessible, of the happy few, lords or nabobs of Great Britain!’
Denon, still running the Louvre even after Napoleon’s abdication, attempted to justify their acquisitions when he organised an exhibition in 1814 that included some of Joseph’s paintings selected from the reserve collections. In July 1815, he staged an extremely popular show in the Salon Carré of 123 early Flemish and German works. Wellington was determined to stop this. Writing from Paris to Lord Castlereagh in September that year, he stressed ‘the claim of the Allies8 to their pictures, because they were removed by military concessions, of which they are the trophies … the property should be returned to their rightful owners.’ It would also be an excellent ‘opportunity of giving the people of France a great moral lesson’.
The ambiguity of Wellington’s own position might have inspired Hay’s caution over the provenance of his van Eyck. After Wellington rescued the artworks from Joseph’s baggage at Vitoria, he sent them back to England for protection (just as Hay might have sent back the van Eyck) in the charge of his brother, Lord Maryborough. The latter employed the restorer and dealer William Seguier to catalogue the more significant paintings. These turned out to be far more interesting than Wellington had realised, worth, Seguier calculated, over £40,000 (at least £2 million in today’s money). Wellington initially tried to do the honourable thing and hand them back to Spain. In March 1814, he wrote to his other brother Sir Henry Wellesley, then British ambassador in Madrid, concerning the ‘prints, drawings and pictures’ rescued at Vitoria: ‘I sent them to England …9 and have found that there are among them much finer pictures than I conceived there were; and as, if the King’s palaces have been robbed of pictures, it is not improbable that some of his may be among them, I am desirous of returning them to His Majesty.’10 In the meantime, he was having them ‘put to rights’ and cleaned as necessary. The Spanish court made no response until Wellington brought the matter up again two years later, in September 1816. This time the Spanish ambassador in London replied, ‘His Majesty, touched by your delicacy, does not wish to deprive you of that which has come into your possession by means as just as they are honourable.’ They were a handsome addition to the collection which the Spanish had earlier presented Wellington of works from the royal family’s summer palace of La Granja in reward for the victory at Salamanca (where Hay had received a broken arm). Seguier’s catalogue gave some sense of Joseph’s taste: the earliest work he had taken was by Juan de Flandes, a painting originally owned by Queen Isabella, and he had included other Flemish works, by Bruegel and Teniers, which had survived the 1734 fire at the Alcazar. The haul included examples looted from other royal palaces as well as the Madrid Palacio Real.
While Hay gradually recovered in Brussels, his regiment chased Napoleon back to Paris, then spent a pleasant autumn hunting and attending balls in Normandy. They returned to England in December 1815 and were feted as the only cavalry regiment to have served right through the Peninsular campaign and then fought at Waterloo. Hay was made a Companion of the Bath in acknowledgement of his gallantry in battle. But despite his miraculous recovery, it was many months before he was fit enough to be considered for service again. As a convalescent officer on half pay, Hay began a new campaign – to sell his van Eyck.
BEYOND THE WINDOW, in the sunny world outside, we can just make out a cherry tree in fruit, which suggests it is early summer. The artist has squeezed details of the tree into a space barely 5 millimetres wide, in the narrow angle between the central mullion and the brick outer frame of the window, turning them into a lively pattern of leaves and fruit, made sharp and clear by dozens of tiny brushstrokes. Placing something in the distance, beyond the neatly confined interior, was van Eyck’s way of challenging the beholder’s eye, making it refocus and master a different perspective.
He repeats this trick in a more dazzling way with the mirror on the back wall, a feature that has fascinated viewers down the ages. ‘Almost nothing is more11 wonderful than the mirror painted in the picture, in which you see whatever is represented as in a real mirror,’ wrote the Italian Bartolomeo Fazio, who eulogised van Eyck’s work within a generation of the master’s death. However, he was not referring to the mirror in the Arnolfini room but to a different example, in one of those titillating bathing scenes that were in such demand. This suggests that a mirror was one of van Eyck’s hallmarks, just the kind of classy touch a discriminating patron like Arnolfini would want included. Five hundred years after Fazio The Times asked, ‘The most notable mirrors12 in the wide wide world? The answer is easy enough … First the mirror in which are reflected the calm features of Velázquez’s Venus, and second – even more marvellous – the mirror hanging on the wall in the van Eyck Arnolfini portrait.’
The mirror is like a great eye in the centre of the work. It reflects the reverse of the painted images – the backs of the man and the woman – but supplies a new subject, the frontal view of two more people entering the room through a door in the opposite wall. This creates the most confusing sense of three-dimensionality, further compounded by the fact that the glass reveals more of the room than the ‘real’ painting does. It is truly a looking-glass world. The mirror is like a picture within a picture, and the ultimate stroke of van Eyck’s trickery is the introduction of two characters who only exist in their painted reflection, as if excluded from the ‘actual’ room they are apparently entering. By inviting the painting’s viewers to question the scope of their own vision, van Eyck was proving effortlessly that he was the master painter of the day.
The mirror carries even more meanings than the other aspects of the room. It was, of course, another status symbol, as rare a domestic item as window glass. Mirrors were uncommon, expensive and reserved for the elite: the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy had a mirror in their palace at Hesdin, while the duchess kept another in her chamber. Those few privileged owners were able to see their own faces – whereas ordinary people never could – and realise the impact of headdress or hairstyle, jewellery and clothes. In a world that measured status by external display, being able to see yourself gave a rare insight.
The circular, slightly convex surface was the only shape then available for mirrors made of glass. Highly polished metal like bronze or copper provided a flat reflective surface but the best and the lightest images came from glass backed by molten lead, tin or pewter. The profile was necessarily convex because this type of mirror could only be manufactured from a blown globe of glass and a cast sphere of metal. In the fifteenth century, Venice was the most celebrated source of spectacularly beautiful glass vessels, but the north held its own for technical expertise. The centre of mirror making was Nuremberg, a town which excelled in precision metalwork for scientific instruments, locks and clocks, armour and weapons, made for export throughout Europe. ‘Nuremberg mirrors’ were the town’s most famous product, and mirror makers were regarded as alchemists.
Convex glass provided an intriguingly distorting vision which simultaneously reduced and expanded the image reflected. Magically, the wide-angle lens showed to the beholder more than his own eye could take in at one glance: this was a facility that artists welcomed, so a convex mirror was a standard item of workshop equipment. (The early seventeenth-century theorist Roger de Piles insisted that artists must use convex mirrors in order to achieve harmony and unity.) van Eyck’s Italian contemporaries were also aware of the mirror’s power. Brunelleschi, the ingenious Florentine architect and designer of the cathedral dome, was possibly the first to use one in order to draw the correct relationship of buildings in a townscape. Such a mirror would have aided van Eyck’s recurrent exploration of the potentials of reflection. His works show how concerned he was to recapture the effects of light through the potentially perfect illusionism of oil paint. Some of the jewels in The Ghent Altarpiece were exquisite two-dimensional recreations of multifaceted gems which seemed to reflect the exact angle of the light cast from the windows in the side chapel that was its ultimate destination. In the Dresden Madonna, the helmet of the attendant St Michael reflects the figures of the Madonna and Child, as if they were present in some real space beyond the painted surface. In the Madonna with Canon van der Paele, St George’s gleaming shield reflects not only the adjacent pillar and details of the saint’s armour, but a minuscule figure whom we may assume to be the artist himself – a man wearing a red hat, dark blue gown and red hose, whose arm is raised as if he is holding up a brush or estimating the proportions. The larger figure of the two characters in the Arnolfini mirror wears a similiar outfit, while his smaller companion, who is possibly van Eyck’s servant, is clad in a red gown. The inscription above the mirror, Johannes van Eyck fuit hic .– Jan van Eyck has been here or as some have argued Jan van Eyck was this man – followed by the date 1434 confirms the presence of the artist himself embedded for posterity in this invented room . It is typical of his playful use of inscriptions on the frame or within the painting rather than a conventional signature. The Virgin with Chancellor Rolin (c. 1435, Louvre) is another example of his Hitchcockian insertion of himself into his work, not this time as a reflection but as a minuscule person in the background, far beyond the pillars that frame the main characters. For here are the same two little characters as in the Arnolfini mirror, this time with their backs turned to us as they contemplate the background view of lake, bridge, town and distant mountains. This is a very early example of landscape painting in its own right, and van Eyck has perhaps emphasised this by showing the creator justifiably admiring the scene.
The details of the mirror prove it was a superior type, having an exceptionally elaborate frame surrounded by ten lobes decorated with enamelled roundels. These contain the only overtly biblical subject matter in the whole painting, for they show ten scenes illustrating Christ’s Passion and Resurrection: the Agony in the Garden, Arrest of Christ, Christ before Pilate, Flagellation, Christ carrying the Cross, Crucifixion, Descent from the Cross, Entombment, Harrowing of Hell and Resurrection. The presence of such familiar motifs in a living room was not at all unexpected in a pious age when some grand families had private chapels within their homes and many kept items of devotion in their living rooms. The Duchess of Burgundy’s prized mirror was decorated with an image of the Holy Sepulchre.
A mirror could stand for good or evil. On the bad side, it was an attribute of Vanity, and sometimes even symbolised the power of Satan, who was believed to lurk within the glass to lure and deceive; the Devil was sometimes represented in art by the image of a monkey holding a mirror, and the moralistic Chevalier de la Tour Landry warned his daughters against looking in mirrors for fear of seeing the Devil’s arse instead. Dürer illustrated this theme, while his contemporary Hans Baldung Grien depicted a young woman holding up a mirror to her face but seeing instead the reflection of a grinning skull. However, the virtuous figure of Prudence might also carry a looking glass, and the Virgin herself was compared to an unblemished mirror. van Eyck included the words speculum sine macula (mirror without a blemish) on the frames of the van der Paele and Dresden Madonnas, and also inscribed them on the Annunciation panel on The Ghent Altarpiece. Given the other potential references to the Virgin, one role of the mirror in the Arnolfinis’ room might be as yet another contribution to the Marian parallels.
By placing the mirror at the heart of his painting, van Eyck was displaying his exceptional technical skills, and perhaps differentiating himself from other local craftsmen and artists. The Bruges guild of painters also included mirror makers, both, in their different ways, concerned with reflecting reality. But they were not seen as privileged interpreters of the world, merely professional artisans; other members of the guild were sculptors, cloth painters, glaziers, saddlers and horse-collar makers. However, van Eyck’s superior status as a member of the duke’s household exempted him from membership and placed him on a higher plane.