IN THIS NATIONALISTIC mood of post-Napoleonic redistribution, van Eyck’s name came to increasing prominence in relation to The Ghent Altarpiece, his best-known work. The French had seized its central panels when they invaded the Netherlands in 1794, returning them in May 1816 from the Louvre to St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent. The wing panels of Adam and Eve had previously been put into storage on the grounds of their shocking nudity, and the other side panels had been successfully concealed from the French in the town hall, though Denon had tried to get hold of them too. But in December 1816, before the whole work could be reassembled, the cathedral authorities sold the wings for 3,000 florins to an art dealer, Lambert-Jean Nieuwenhuys (father of the dealer Chrétien-Jean Nieuwenhuys, who in 1843 reported that James Hay had found his van Eyck in Brussels). It was proof of the growing interest in van Eyck and his contemporaries, stimulated by their display in the Louvre, that Nieuwenhuys had begun specialising in Flemish art because he realised there was a market for it. He sold the wings to the Berlin-based English businessman, Edward Solly, for 100,000 florins. And Solly sold them to the king of Prussia for 400,000 florins in 1821.
The art trade began to recover in the new, unfamiliar era of peace, when the names of Wellington and Waterloo were synonymous with a confident pride in being British. In London, the dealer William Buchanan was keen to profit from the works he had so laboriously acquired in Spain, and tempted prospective buyers with a catalogue of ‘some of the most valuable1 pictures which were in the royal palaces of Spain consigned to my care’. A mere 20,000 guineas would secure one lot that included Raphael, Leonardo, Correggio, Titian and Velázquez. He also offered Flemish and Dutch works, though nothing as early as the fifteenth century. In 1815, he handled the 200 Spanish, Italian and Flemish works that Lucien Bonaparte had removed from Spain in 1802. Buchanan justified his trade and encouraged likely customers by arguing that importing works of art enriched the host country, improved taste and educated artists.
So it seemed a promising time for the hard-up Hay to find a purchaser for his van Eyck, and he approached the greediest and most extravagant art collector and patron in the country, George, Prince Regent. In 1816, the Prince was aged fifty-four and still waiting to become king. Owing to his father’s madness and blindness, he had been promoted from Prince of Wales to Prince Regent in 1811 and now basked in the glory of ruling a country that had defeated the French and saved Europe: the Prince even seemed to believe occasionally that he had personally fought in the Peninsular campaign and at the battle of Waterloo. His interests, however, had always been cultural rather than constitutional, involving lavish expenditure on buildings and their contents, where his mercurial, eclectic tastes ran riot. After Napoleon’s final downfall, the Prince sought to present himself as the leader of Europe and with the new funds he had acquired after becoming Regent, wanted his palaces to rival those of continental rulers. He was now spending less time in his oriental fantasy pavilion in Brighton, and he disliked draughty, old-fashioned Windsor, where his parents mainly lived. His current favourite building project was the refurbishment of his official London residence, Carlton House in Pall Mall.
Once a simple villa erected in the bucolic wilderness of St James’s Park, the property now blended classical, oriental and Gothic features, with Gold and Crimson Drawing Rooms, a Blue Velvet Room, a crimson and gold Throne Room, a classical Circular Room, and a florid Gothic Conservatory. The burgeoning costs of the Prince’s expansions and alterations to the building had already been raised during Parliament’s 1795 investigation into his mounting debts, when it grudgingly granted him a further £60,000 to complete the project. Rehanging all his pictures to complement the new wall decorations would turn the building into a giant art gallery. The Prince was an avid, restless collector. He bought paintings copiously then sold them or gave them away. His contacts in the art world knew that keeping in the good books of this greedy patron was an important source of income and favour, and that the new hang in Carlton House was an excellent opportunity.
Among the Prince’s circle of advisers was the restorer and dealer William Seguier (who had catalogued Joseph Bonaparte’s artistic spoils for Wellington), and the artist Sir Thomas Lawrence,2 successor to Sir Joshua Reynolds as the king’s ‘Principal Painter’. Lawrence was a smooth and charming man who moved in grand circles and was in high favour with the Prince, although he had only relatively recently entered the royal good books. The Prince had previously employed John Hoppner, ignoring the flamboyant Lawrence because he had already portrayed the Prince’s estranged wife Caroline of Brunswick (apparently becoming so intimate with her that he was summoned to give evidence in the Delicate Investigation of 1806 into her possible adultery; fortunately his name was cleared). After Hoppner’s death the Prince commissioned Lawrence in the summer of 1814 to paint his portrait. Lawrence’s interpretation of him as a slim young hero on the battlefield, wearing the immaculate uniform of a fieldmarshal (such a contrast to George Cruikshank’s savage caricatures, but which Cruikshaik later parodied in his cruel triptych of 1816, ‘Gent, No Gent, Re gent!!’) so pleased the Prince that he commissioned Lawrence to paint all the allied leaders, including of course the Duke of Wellington, and knighted him in April 1815. These portraits, intended to hang together in the ‘Waterloo’ chamber at Windsor Castle, were exhibited in the 1815 summer show at the Royal Academy.
Opinions remain deeply divided as to whether George IV was one of the greatest royal art patrons, or a selfish, tasteless voluptuary. Lawrence’s view was characteristically charitable: his gossipy friend the artist and diarist Joseph Farington recorded that ‘Sir Thomas Lawrence, who has now been a great deal with the Prince Regent, declared to me his conviction that he is one of the best natured men in the world: that he always has pleasure in doing things that are agreeable to others: and that with some weakness of vanity and the disadvantage of having people about him whose object it always is to accommodate themselves and every other thing to his feeling or humour, and thereby mislead him, yet his kind disposition prevents him from indulging in tyranny or caprice.’ The Prince reciprocated by trusting Lawrence, for once revealing his better nature. Lawrence was society’s favourite portrait painter. Advising on the royal collections or offering a painting on approval was precisely what he was expected to do.
On 10 October 1816, Benjamin Jutsham, the Inspector of Household Deliveries at Carlton House, made an entry in the Ledger of Receipts that he compiled daily: ‘from Sir Thomas Lawrence,3 A Painting in a gilt frame – subject Two Portraits, a male and female joining hands – the Female dressed in green – the Male in black with a large Round Hat on & 33½ x 23¾´´. By John van Heyk – the person who first discovered the art of Painting in oil colours.’ The reason why Hay was using Lawrence as intermediary must have been the military connection. The Duke of Wellington had been so impressed by Lawrence’s portrait of him, and got on so well with the artist, that he commissioned more portraits of himself and of his generals for his own collection at Apsley House. He even showed off some of his loot from Vitoria: Farington recorded on 4 July 1816 that ‘the Duke of Wellington had been with Sir T. Lawrence and brought with him a small portrait in oil of Bonaparte, the Picture that was found in Joseph Bonaparte’s carriage at the Battle of Vitoria’. There was a real fascination with Bonaparte memorabilia that summer: Bullock’s Museum in the exotic ‘Egyptian Hall’ in Piccadilly was exhibiting ‘Bonaparte’s carriage – with its coachman and two of his horses, built-in bed, wardrobe and writing desk, the golden washing basin, silver sandwich box and many other accessories of unimaginable luxury’.
Thomas Lawrence, The Prince Regent
James Hay, who had survived Waterloo by a miracle and was on half pay with a picture to sell, may have learned from his military colleagues that Lawrence was in regular contact with Wellington in the summer of 1816, when he was also advising the Prince Regent over the new display at Carlton House. ‘Sir T. Lawrence … told me he was with4 the Prince Regent this morning to give his opinion about arranging Pictures at Carlton House … he observed that the Prince is fond of Pictures,’ announced Farington. Intimacy was growing. The Prince and Lawrence dined together frequently, and the artist provided guidance on which artists to commission, on the authenticity of certain works, and even on which paintings to buy. This was a well-recognised role: Farington, for example, advised John Constable, who was seeking to help a friend who had two pictures for sale, to approach Lawrence to recommend a purchaser.
This was why Hay contacted him too. Lawrence himself was a discriminating collector of old master drawings, when his chaotic finances permitted, and he was sufficiently impressed by the soldier’s van Eyck to offer it on a trial-or-return basis which would give the Prince ample time to make up his mind. After it reached Carlton House in October 1816, it was hung upstairs, according to an inventory compiled that December for valuation purposes, complicated by this being a time of social unrest when the costs of victory had inevitably caused inflation and unemployment. Farington of course took an interest: ‘Sir T. Lawrence told me that the Prince Regent5 being uncertain what Mobs might do at this disturbed time had thought it prudent to have his pictures at Carlton House valued, and an insurance made upon them. A catalogue of them was making by Bryant who had been recommended by Christie, but his Royal Highness wished Sir T. Lawrence to superintend the whole of what was to be done. Sir Thomas thought that myself and Mr Ottley might unite with him in valuing the pictures but I declined it and thought Ottley and himself might do it properly.’
As a dealer and gallery owner the cataloguer Michael Bryant was well qualified for the task. His laconic entry for Hay’s painting was: ‘No. 168, Portrait of a man6 and his wife, John van Eyck. 2´8´´ x 1´11´.’ It was located in ‘the Middle Attic next to the Prince’s Bed-Room’. Attic here simply meant the upper storey, the floor where the Prince slept, and not the servants’ quarters. The painting’s proximity to the royal bedroom suggests that the Prince must have seen it many times, although, as Lawrence realised, upstairs was not an appropriate location for significant pictures: ‘The Prince proposed7 to remove a collection of enamel pictures painted by Bone from a room which was at present furnished with them to His own Bedchamber a very large room, but where they would comparatively be but little seen. On this account, Sir T. Lawrence prevailed upon the Prince to allow them to remain where they now are.’ Hanging the van Eyck next to the Prince’s bedroom meant that it was not for public consumption but was very much on approval.
And it ultimately failed the test, because there was a footnote to Bryant’s inventory in a different hand: ‘This Picture was returned to Sir T. Lawrence April 25 1818.’ The Prince Regent may have been hailed as a connoisseur and an arbiter of style, but he was not ready for the early Flemings. His taste in painting focused mainly on British art – the great eighteenth-century portraitists, modern storytellers like David Wilkie, animal scenes and sporting prints. The display in Carlton House did include a number of Dutch and Flemish domestic interiors by popular seventeenth-century genre artists, and there were of course works by Rembrandt and Rubens. But fifteenth-century art, whether Flemish or Italian, was alien to most eyes, except perhaps those of Lawrence himself. So he returned the van Eyck to James Hay in the spring of 1818. Hay was then still on half pay but joined a new regiment, the 4th Light Dragoons, in 1821, transferred to the 17th Dragoons, and then settled with the 2nd Queen’s Regiment of Dragoons, better known as the ‘Queen’s Bays’, where he became Commanding Officer in 1830. The Bays were then serving as a peacekeeping force in Ireland and in the north of England, where they helped quell the industrial riots of the 1820s. Hay did not take his painting to Ireland, however, but left it in London in the care of a fellow Scot, James Wardrop, a doctor and probably a family connection, for his patients included Hay’s soldier cousin William. Wardrop collected art himself, so Hay may have hoped he might buy what the Prince Regent had rejected, especially since Wardrop was one of the Prince Regent’s doctors, not only familiar with the collections hanging on the walls of Carlton House but one of the few who had access to the Prince’s bedroom on the upper floor where the van Eyck had hung. Wardrop became the Prince’s ‘surgeon extraordinary’ in 1818 and was promoted ‘surgeon to His Majesty’ in 1828, one of the team of medical men attending the obese, ailing monarch. Although a respected surgeon and pioneering ophthalmologist, with a royal client and other aristocratic patients, and a wit, gossip and socialite, Wardrop was a controversial figure who undermined the medical establishment by quarrelling with his fellow professionals, whom he attacked anonymously in the pages of the Lancet under the pen name Brutus. This made him so unpopular that he was excluded from attending George IV during his final illness. Wardrop’s other eccentricities included establishing a charitable hospital, and treating the poor for free in his London home in Charles II Street, off St James’s Square.
Wardrop and those who visited him were no more impressed by the van Eyck than the Prince had been: ‘Colonel James Hay8 gave me a picture to take care of during his absence from England. It was hung up in a bedroom where it remained for about thirteen years, during this period it was seen by many visitors, none of whom deemed it worthy of their notice.’ This snide comment suggested that tastes were barely changing during the 1820s and 1830s. Yet although the Prince Regent and Wardrop failed to appreciate the subtlety of the seemingly unostentatious double portrait, a select group of connoisseurs and collectors was becoming interested in early Flemish art; although he did not know it, Hay’s investment was maturing nicely.
The catalyst was German merchant Carl Aders, who had settled in London in 1811 to develop his import–export business but maintained strong contacts with the cultural life of his homeland. He collected many examples of early northern art, boldly preferring German and Netherlandish works to French or Italian ones: he held an open evening in his house once a week so that others could appreciate them too. His circle included the artists John Constable, John Linnell, Samuel Palmer, Henry Fuseli and William Blake, and literary figures like Charles and Mary Lamb, and the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson. They were all interested in the German Romantic tradition, which at that time claimed van Eyck and other Flemings as part of the Germanic heritage. One of the gems of Aders’s collection was a seventeenth-century copy of The Ghent Altarpiece, which he bought in Paris in 1819. As the original was then divided between Ghent and Berlin, London was the only place to experience the overwhelming effect of the masterpiece. Being exposed to van Eyck’s most majestic work, even in the form of a replica, stimulated Fuseli, Palmer and Blake, and inspired drawings by Linnell and a poem by Charles Lamb. Early Flemish art still only appealed to the elite, but the presence of examples in the Aders collection in London helped to widen horizons.
Among Aders’s regular visitors was an influential, art-loving baronet, Sir George Beaumont, whom Farington called ‘the Supreme Dictator on Works of Art’. Beaumont was one of the founders of the British Institution, a gallery established by a group of connoisseurs in 1805 to support British artists by exhibiting their work and those of their distinguished predecessors, in the form of masterpieces loaned by aristocratic owners. These included the Prince, who became the institution’s patron. It was based at 52 Pall Mall, in the well-designed gallery built in the previous century by the entrepreneur Alderman Boydell. In the glorious summer after Waterloo, the institution put on the first ever public exhibition of old masters in England; this event was repeated every three or four years, showing Flemish, Dutch, Italian and French paintings in the hopes that they would inspire modern artists. Sir Thomas Lawrence indeed feared that the institution was impinging on the Royal Academy’s remit and threatened to pull strings: ‘He said they had departed9 from the original object of the Institute, which was to promote the sale of British Art, and were becoming preceptors of artists and thereby acting in direct rivalship or opposition to the Royal Academy as a Seminary … he intended to submit his opinion to the Prince Regent which he would do upon the ground of his owing everything to that establishment.’
Meanwhile, James Hay was with his regiment in Ireland, where he acquired a property at Kelburn, County Longford. Cavalry duties in peacetime were not so arduous as to prevent him from visiting London. Sir Thomas Lawrence died in 1830 (Seguier had to finish some of the uncompleted portraits intended for the Waterloo gallery at Windsor Castle) but Hay reconnected with the art world when he sat for the fashionable portrait painter William Salter. In 1835, Salter began preparatory studies for The Waterloo Banquet, a patriotic work to celebrate the Duke of Wellington’s annual commemoration of the famous battle at the dinner he hosted for veterans in Apsley House. Hay attended this dinner regularly. As Waterloo receded in time, the banquet grew in stature and significance. Like the D-Day commemorations of our own century, there was a poignant awareness that ‘time yearly makes ravages in the ranks of those veteran warriors’, as The Times put it in its report on the 1841 banquet. The event took on an established formula. Forcing their way through cheering crowds in the street, the old soldiers came to Apsley House at 6.30 p.m., where the band of the Grenadier Guards, Wellington’s old regiment, welcomed them in the vestibule. They dined upstairs in the splendid Waterloo gallery, illuminated by a magnificent chandelier and gold candelabra presented by the Emperor of Russia, the table and sideboards adorned with trophies and triumphs, and the walls hung with Wellington’s increasingly fine art collection, at its core Joseph Bonaparte’s paintings from Vitoria.
Salter’s epic portrait of the banquet showed eighty-four diners, among them Hay, barely perceptible at the far end of an extremely long dining table. The work (which hangs today in the entrance hall of Apsley House), effectively combines the sense of occasion with a pleasing informality created by the varied and relaxed poses of the many subjects. Salter completed the painting in 1836, and it evoked so much national pride that the public queued for tickets when it was later exhibited in a commercial gallery. The artist then cleverly developed new commissions from the same subject by producing individual, more formal oil portraits of many of those present at the banquet. (These are now all in the National Portrait Gallery.) His portrait of Hay shows a dapper, amiable-looking man with mutton-chop whiskers, wearing his scarlet cavalry jacket, and holding his sword and helmet.
It might have been while sitting for Salter in around 1840 that Hay decided to do something about his van Eyck again. Although Salter earned his living from portraiture, his aspirations (like so many others) lay in being hailed as a painter of history, creating dramatic and morally uplifting scenes from the past. He had been exhibiting ambitious biblical, classical and literary subjects at the British Institution since 1822, and of course knew that the institution put on occasional loan exhibitions of the old masters. This would be an excellent venue to publicise the little Flemish painting Hay had so far failed to sell. According to Dr Wardrop, ‘During the thirteen years10 Colonel Hay was absent from London I never saw him again until he asked me if it could be convenient for me to send for his picture, which he did accordingly. A few weeks afterward, I saw, to my surprise, in the British Gallery [Institution] Exhibition Colonel Hay’s picture.’ This was the institution’s ‘Ancient Masters’ exhibition of the summer of 1841.
Here, Hay’s van Eyck at last roused the interest of the art world. George Darley was the pioneering art critic of the Athenaeum, a lively weekly review founded in 1828. In a series of articles on the exhibition published in July 1841, he gave the first detailed account of a previously unknown yet definitive work by a master to whom there were far too many uncertain attributions in existence. ‘It has never been our luck11 to see throughout England so many van Eycks as every other dilettante we meet with, who would seem to have put them up like partridge in coveys; we believe they are no more abundant here than golden eagles. The picture before us cannot be doubted; its brilliant colour flashes conviction upon anyone to whom the style of van Eyck is familiar.’ With those words, he brought Hay’s trophy painting into the public eye.
George Darley was an Irishman with a bad stammer who came to London in 1821 to establish a literary career. Through journalism, short stories and mathematical textbooks, he subsidised his rather less successful poems and plays. His intellectual circle included the comic poet Thomas Hood (who noted how Darley’s ears wiggled like those of a rabbit when he was about to make a pronouncement) and Charles Lamb, an habitué of Aders’s art collection evenings. In the early 1830s, after visiting the major continental art galleries, Darley extended his range from theatre to art criticism. He learned to appreciate the early art of Belgium and Germany, still so unfashionable in England; following a visit to the art gallery in Dresden, he approved how ‘the antique painters12 such as Memling, van Eyck, Fra Beato and Francia have regained the station to which their exquisite feeling and spiritual finish and beauty entitle them’. It was the spiritual perfection of early art, whether northern or Italian, that most impressed him because of the contrast it made with what he saw as the gross materialism of modern art and taste, tainted by middle-class patrons and poorly trained artists. He became the Athenaeum’s regular arts correspondent, and used its pages to denounce the current passion for seventeenth-century realism (he sneered at ‘the hugger-mugger13 homeliness of a Dutch cabinet picture’) and for portraiture (‘the lowest department of the arts’).
By 1840, he was London’s most eminent art critic (his occasional frivolity, however, provoking the Morning Chronicle to announce, ‘We do not … approve14 of the flippancy of Mr Darley’s style of writing’) and used his platform to rail against the absence of early art in Britain: ‘There is not,15 we believe, a single specimen of Fra Angelico’s painting in the British Empire, filled with “dead game” and Dutch pictures to its roofs.’ He urged the young National Gallery to extend its range if such works came up in the sale rooms, attacking its ‘inexcusable conduct’ for failing to acquire the fragment of a Lippi fresco. He was certainly familiar with the replica of The Ghent Altarpiece in Aders’s collection, for he mentioned how van Eyck’s ‘formal perpendicularity16 and severe parallelism of composition, however disagreeable when their altarpieces are seen in drawing rooms, fitted them with marvellous accord to their proper recesses in churches.’ His various articles for the Athenaeum included a review of the French artist Léonor Mérimée’s On Oil Painting and an article that stressed van Eyck’s contribution to, rather than invention of, that medium. When he reviewed the British Institution exhibition of 1841, he was better qualified than most people, both stylistically and technically, to appreciate a genuine van Eyck.
Darley’s exhibition review consisted of four articles published weekly in the summer of 1841, suitable coverage for a major show that contained works by Raphael, da Vinci, Rubens, Rembrandt, Teniers, two Cranachs (loaned by Prince Albert), Dürer, van Dyck, Correggio, Carracci, del Sarto and the more recent Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough and Stothard. The extensive Dutch section included a Teniers and a Wouvermans loaned by the Duke of Wellington: this might have inspired Hay to become a lender. The first article stressed the overall quality of the show – ‘what a pleasure to find in these times so unambitious of true excellence anything that we can honestly and heartily praise! … we have seldom seen an exhibition that contained more of undeniable merit or attractiveness in one regard or another’ – and he discussed the star exhibits, which included four alleged Raphaels. He came to the van Eyck in the second article, after a long preamble criticising the unthinking reverence given to great names and challenging the authenticity of the so-called da Vinci, whose Infant Christ and John the Baptist he dismissed as ‘two gross grimacing boys’ and attributed the work to Luini. Applying the same principles of ‘connoisseurship’ (the correct identification of an artist’s hand) to Portraits of a Gentleman and a Lady by John van Eyck, he announced, ‘This is also a great name and something more – a true one, and something better still, a great reality… . its clear keen style resembles that of the great Ghent Adoration.’
Then he skilfully analysed van Eyck’s distinctive method of handling oils, which made the woman’s flesh ‘as sweet and pure17 as the first blush of a sunbright morn … [its] wondrous firmness and translucency … assisted perhaps by the antique method of keeping each colour simple and separate instead of fusing or breaking it into the colour next to it … [her robe] shines out as lucid and dazzling as liquefied emerald’. While recognising the work as technically brilliant in terms of colour and finish, Darley expressed certain reservations about the style and subject, warning against ‘our amorous descants on primitive art, our love-laboured songs about the deep feeling, solemn beauty, simple grandeur and so forth of very ancient pictures despite their uncouthness, stiffness etc. These portraits, so the catalogue calls them, exhibit neither pathos, beauty nor grandeur though they are simple and solemn enough, he, a straight, lank, quakerish object, in a black broad-brimmed, high-crowned hat, stands full front before us, as if ready to moan; she, twisted three ways at once, bends sidelong towards him, with one hand on her stomacher like a lady who had “loved her lord” six months ere he became so; verily, this strange pair, hand-in-hand, resemble nothing better than Simon Pure about to atone for a faux-pas by making Sarah Prim an honest woman. However, the old-fashioned costume occasions much of this ludicrous effect; present fashions will perhaps render portraits painted nowadays no less laughable to posterity.’ Darley was aware that reviewers have a duty to entertain as well as to inform; and for a man who based his critical tenets on the idealising theories of Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, he was happy to mock those purist Gothic Revivalists like Pugin who refused to admire anything produced later than the Middle Ages.
The reviewer for the Observer begged to disagree, claiming that Portraits of a Gentleman and a Lady could never have been painted by van Eyck on the curiously inaccurate grounds that the clothes and the furniture ‘are both of a much later date18 than the lifetime of the putative painter’, working between 1410 and 1441. Nor was the style right: ‘Though a good picture of its class, it wants that surpassing richness of positive colours, that astonishing clearness, and most extreme delicacy of finish which are stamped upon all the productions of his period.’ This might have been a deliberate challenge to Darley’s authority, arising from some ancient journalistic feud.
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for September 1841 was far more impressed. Towards the end of a long article which unfavourably contrasted the over-stuffed Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (‘there is not a picture of Turner’s that is more than ridiculous’) with the institution’s fine works of the past, the writer regretted that the National Gallery had not bought Jan Steen’s The School, ‘a very fine picture which would give more pleasure to nine-tenths of the people who visit the National Gallery than would the finer products of the Italian schools’. At the institution:
there is one other picture,19 however, which we must not omit to mention – the van Eyck. Much has been said of late of van Eyck’s supposed invention of painting in oil. This production therefore demanded great attention. It is wonderfully luminous, more so indeed than any picture in the room, and the finish is quite wonderful. Strange and stiff enough it is, and odd in form and design – but the painting, the texture, for which we look at it, is surpassingly beautiful. The metallic lamp and the clogs are specimens of most exquisite and elaborate work – the metal and the wood are perfect imitations.
The reviewers’ interest, combined with mounting criticism that the National Gallery lacked representative works of the northern schools, both earlier Flemish and later Dutch, meant that James Hay was able at last to sell his van Eyck to the nation. In the early summer of 1842, Dr Wardrop recalled, ‘Mr Seguier, the picture restorer,20 called on me, mentioning I was a friend of Colonel Hay, who was then in Ireland, if I would communicate to him that he, Mr Seguier, had recommended the Trustees of the National Gallery to purchase the picture, and he was authorised to offer 600 guineas for it. This sum Colonel Hay accepted. The picture became of greater value annually, and now hangs in the National Gallery, much prized!!!’
HANGING FROM THE ceiling is an elaborate chandelier that seems to be made of highly polished brass. The chandelier is placed exactly above the mirror, so that they both form the central axis of the painting. van Eyck has included it as another painterly tour de force of gleaming light and intricate detail, though it seems overlarge and somehow out of proportion to the space available. It has six branches, and there is a socket at each tip to hold a candle, although only two candles are shown. One, on the man’s side of the room, is lit, its bright flame further demonstrating van Eyck’s ability to paint light – hardly needed on that bright summer’s day. The other candle, in one of the sockets on the woman’s side, is just a stub which has gone out as evidenced by a little trail of smoke. If the candles have a symbolic meaning, it remains unclear; some commentators believe the lit candle signifies the drafting of a dowry agreement (binding when it burns out), while others say the spent candle notifies a death. The mechanism that attaches the chandelier to the ceiling is not visible, and van Eyck has tackled the complexity of showing six equidistant branches by flattening the angle of those nearest to the viewer. Each branch is crescent-shaped, decorated below with architectural motifs like those carved on the chair back and above with stylised animal forms and a bracket terminating in a fleurs-de-lys. All these flattened, faceted decorations help to refract the light further. The sturdy central unit ends at the bottom in a ring, clasped in an animal’s mouth, which would help pull the chandelier up and down.
Altogether, it is far too ornate for a domestic setting, and was therefore an implausible symbol of high status in a living room. In the Middle Ages, lighting was the greatest luxury, originally the preserve of religious buildings: Antwerp Cathedral in the early fifteenth century possessed 400 chandeliers. It was not until the later fifteenth century that they began to be adopted for domestic use (though the palaces of Duke Philip the Good probably had their fair share) to create an elegant and expensive way of casting light from above rather than the oblique angles of separate candlesticks on table or windowsill. Being able to create such light extended the hours of the day; chandelier owners did not have to go to bed at dusk. The cost of candles also indicated privilege. Ordinary people made do with the rank tallow candles made from rendered beef or mutton fat, but rich people like merchants used pleasantly scented beeswax.
Like many other objects in the room, brass chandeliers were a local product, perhaps among the stock-in-trade of an Italian exporter from Bruges. A manufacturing centre since the thirteenth century, the town of Dinant on the Upper Meuse gave its name to ‘dinanderies’, superior brass wares – chandeliers and candlesticks, jugs and ewers, crosses and censers – made from the sturdy alloy of copper from Norway and Sweden, and tin from Bohemia (all imported though Bruges), cast or hammered into shape, and decorated by incising and chiselling.
Having such a chandelier in a domestic chamber was a mark of aspirational wealth, offset however, like the rest of the room’s contents, by its association with images of the Virgin. In Rogier van der Weyden’s Annunciation (c. 1434, Louvre), there is a brass chandelier of very similar shape to van Eyck’s, although much smaller. It too has six branches, each ending in the outline of an animal’s head. A clearly depicted pulley and chain show how it was raised and lowered from the ceiling. (Other parallels to the Arnolfini room in this painting are the red hung bed, the settle with red cushions, and oranges on the chimneypiece.) Dieric Bouts included chandeliers in his Last Supper (1464–67, Louvain) and Annunciation (c. 1445, Prado); the latter suggests direct homage to van Eyck, or van der Weyden, because there is also a settle with red cushions and drapes, and an orange on the windowsill. This chandelier is again much smaller but otherwise strikingly similar to van Eyck’s in the stout central pole and the fleur-de-lys ornamental terminals.