IN 1842, THE National Gallery was only eighteen years old, although there had been attempts to establish a national art collection since the late eighteenth century. Denon’s Louvre, with its edifying historical displays, was a beacon of excellence. When its illegally obtained works first began to be dispersed in 1814, the Prince Regent demanded some ‘for a museum or gallery here’.1 He might have meant for his own private collection, but the dealer William Buchanan gave him the benefit of the doubt: ‘When the sovereign2 himself, a Prince of refined taste and extensive attainments, takes a lead in the establishment of institutions calculated to defuse a general knowledge … when Galleries of a public nature are forming in several of the principal cities of the Empire … [may] the reign of George IV rival the period of Lorenzo de Medici … the present epoch will ever be memorable in the history of this country by His Majesty having declared his pleasure that England shall possess a Public and National Gallery of the works of the great painters’.
Such a gallery would provide London with a painting collection as accessible and excellent as those in the other great cities of Europe. The Napoleonic wars provided a vital stimulus, when redrawn boundaries and the discovery of artworks previously hidden in palaces and monasteries encouraged a nationalistic interest in styles and periods beyond the dominant Italian renaissance canon. Yet the aims of the founders of the National Gallery were by no means altruistic. Admission should be free in the hopes that art might improve society by keeping the working classes away from drink and radicalism (the French Revolution cast a long shadow). ‘In the present times3 of political excitement, the exacerbation of angry and unsocial feelings might be much softened by the effects which the fine arts had ever produced on the minds of men,’ according to Sir Robert Peel, who argued in 1833 for the expansion of the gallery; though the art-loving Tory politician did concede the justness of conferring ‘advantages on those classes which had but little leisure to enjoy the most refined species of pleasure’. There were also commercial reasons. Exposing artists and designers to great art would improve manufacture, and thus boost British trade. Finally, a national collection that included fine foreign paintings would help preserve the status quo from dangerously modern artists.
In the summer of 1823, the art collection of the late John Julius Angerstein, a wealthy, Russian-born insurance broker, came on the market in the form of thirty-six masterpieces, among them works by Claude, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Cuyp, and the native Hogarth, Reynolds and Wilkie. This gave the government a perfect opportunity to intervene. One still influential voice was Sir George Beaumont, founder of the British Institution, and a man with a finger in every artistic pie. He now tried to bribe the government into reaching the right decision: ‘Buy Mr Angerstein’s collection4 and I will give you mine.’ This generous offer made available to the nation a further sixteen works – including landscapes, his particular interest, by Claude, Poussin and Canaletto – and it helped persuade Parliament to agree the necessary money. In March 1824, the Commons voted £60,000 for the purchase, preservation and exhibition of the Angerstein collection, and Prime Minister Lord Liverpool acquired the lease of Angerstein’s house at 100 Pall Mall, where the pictures hung. This was the first home of the National Gallery.
The government established a Committee for the Superintendence of the National Gallery, drawn mainly from existing trustees of the British Museum; the members included Beaumont, Sir Thomas Lawrence and Sir Robert Peel. On 30 March, they appointed the well-connected William Seguier (already responsible for George IV’s collection, superintendent at the British Institution, and art adviser to Peel) as keeper on a salary of £200 per annum. The new gallery opened on 28 April 1824. Access was free, and it was available to the public four days a week, with a maximum of 200 people allowed in the building at any one time. At the end of the first week, Seguier described the visitors as very orderly and well behaved. Within the first six months, it attracted more than 24,000 visitors.
It was the keeper’s job to negotiate purchases but the initial acquisitions policy was cautious, especially because of the appallingly cramped conditions at 100 Pall Mall where the weight of the growing collection threatened to crumble the walls, and the fire hazards were extreme. Initially, there was little interest in acquiring pre-renaissance art. The trustee Peel collected later Dutch artists (the sort of works Darley loathed) but did not like the early Italian masters, whom he called ‘curiosities’. So when bankruptcy forced Carl Aders to put his predominantly early northern collection on the market in the 1830s, the National Gallery was not interested, and the works were sold off piecemeal at very low prices in two main sales in 1835 and 1839. After the first sale, Henry Crabb Robinson offered the replica of The Ghent Altarpiece to the Gallery for £250 but Seguier rejected it on the grounds of lack of funds. Lack of interest was more likely to be the case.
By 1842, however, after Hay’s van Eyck had received critical acclaim at the British Institution, circumstances and attitudes began to change. Prince Albert had helped make Germanic art fashionable, and the National Gallery, which now owned around 180 paintings, had moved to more spacious, purpose-built premises. Designed by William Wilkins, the building was erected in the new public space that was being cleared northwest of Charing Cross, and would be named Trafalgar Square after the erection of Nelson’s Column in November 1843. The gallery occupied the west wing but shared the accommodation rather uneasily with the Royal Academy, which was in the eastern wing. The classical facade commemorated the late George IV, because the huge Corinthian columns of the portico came from the now demolished Carlton House.
George Darley attributed the gallery’s hitherto unadventurous purchasing policy to the approach of keeper William Seguier, whose obituary he wrote for the Athenaeum in 1843. This was a surprisingly inappropriate tirade in which Darley took the opportunity to attack the current state of the arts in Britain and in particular ‘the superintendence of national establishments’. Damning Seguier with faint praise as ‘an amiable and respected man’ who had used his natural common sense to move from being an unsuccessful artist to a competent picture restorer, he had regrettably turned into ‘a wary connoisseur – a leading critic – and at length an oracle’. And Darley recounted how this ‘uneducated man frequented the highest circles, where his natural good breeding received a polish that, despite the said drawbacks, carried him well through conversations not over-refined’. This was the fault of the ‘essentially vulgar-minded’ George IV for promoting him in the first place, and ‘the despicable nature of the “aesthetics” then prevalent’. For Darley, Seguier represented a decline in modern standards which denied the need for any director of a collection to be ‘educated, familiar with art, literature and criticism’. Another of Darley’s demands was that collections should be well documented. Yet ‘the catalogue Seguier drew up5 for the National Gallery would vindicate more than we have said against his limited attainments; it swarmed at first with errors, and is still over-run with them’.
Others shared this view. When Dr Wardrop recalled that it was the keeper who had recommended the purchase of Hay’s van Eyck to the trustees, he got it the wrong way round. The keeper was subordinate to the trustees and, given the gallery’s tight budget, only someone of greater influence and more discriminating taste would have initiated such a significant purchase. The moving spirit was almost certainly Charles Eastlake, one of the great and the good, and another former visitor to Aders’s collection. Eastlake had trained as an artist and became a history painter in Rome for some years; however, after a visit to Flanders, he developed a passion for early Netherlandish art. After he returned to London in 1830, it was his networking rather than his painting skills that made him an influential member of the art establishment. In 1841, he was appointed Secretary of the Fine Arts Commission (president Prince Albert), responsible for selecting the decorative scheme of the new Palace of Westminster. His friend Sir Robert Peel, who instigated the commission, was also a trustee of the National Gallery. Eastlake realised that he could give the young institution the kind of breadth and chronological sweep of Denon’s Louvre that had so impressed him, and many other English visitors. After Seguier’s death, Peel appointed Eastlake as the new keeper of the gallery.
In the early summer of 1842, the trustees of the National Gallery officially sanctioned the acquisition of Colonel Hay’s van Eyck, following some behind-the-scenes pressure. As the gallery had no funds of its own, all purchases had to be made through the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and it was therefore necessary to secure informal advance approval before making an official request for the money. According to the minutes of the gallery trustees’ meeting of 2 May, attended by the Duke of Sutherland, the Marquis of Lansdowne, Lords Monteagle and Colbourne, and the collector Mr William Wells, it was ‘resolved that the Trustees are of opinion that the extraordinary merit of the Picture by van Eyck, its perfect preservation, its extreme rarity and the moderate price at which it may be obtained, viz 600 guineas, moves them to recommend it without hesitation to my Lords as a valuable addition to the National Collection, and that a copy of this minute be forwarded to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury in answer to their recommendation’. C. E. Trevelyan, the secretary to the Treasury Commissioners, confirmed his masters’ approval, though at the same time he made it clear that the request for a further £10,300 for other paintings, including a Velázquez, would not be forthcoming ‘under the present circumstances.6 But as my Lords have reason to believe that there are some particular circumstances connected with the picture by van Eyck which render it desirable that that picture should be acquired for the public, their Lordships would be willing to make provision for the purchase of it, on being informed of the manner in which it has been ascertained that the sum demanded for it is not beyond that which the merits of the picture entitle the party to demand.’ The sum of 600 guineas was at the lower end of the scale of prices paid by the Treasury over previous years. Correggio’s Holy Family was worth £8,800, Rubens’ Judgement of Paris £4,200, Murillo’s St John £2,100. However, Bellini’s Doge Loredano had also cost 600 guineas, and Rembrandt’s Jewish Rabbi was a bargain at £409.10s.
The mills ground slowly. On 13 June 1842, Trevelyan informed the trustees, ‘Having laid before the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Treasury your Secretary’s letter of 3 June conveying your recommendations of the purchase of a picture by van Eyck for 600 guineas, I have it in command to acquaint you that my Lords have directed an Estimate to be prepared for that sum and submitted to Parliament.’ After this seal of approval Seguier collected the painting from Dr Wardrop. But six months later, James Hay had still not been paid, and had embarrassingly to write to the trustees requesting his long overdue 600 guineas. This letter, dated 6 December 1842, lumbered through the official channels, and was not discussed until the trustees’ monthly meeting of February 1843, when it was ‘resolved that a letter7 be written to the Treasury to inform them that the Picture by van Eyck, the purchase of which for £630 was approved by their Lordships is now in the possession of the Trustees and that it is their opinion that the purchase money should be paid to Major-General Hay and, further, that a communication be made to the Gallery to this effect’.
The purchase was not officially announced until the end of the year. George Darley, whose perceptive review had publicised the existence of the unknown masterpiece, was allowed to tell the good news in the Athenaeum of 3 December 1842 in a fulsome item of ‘weekly gossip’ which signalled the welcome impact of Eastlake on the trustees’ decision making. ‘We congratulate all who love the Fine Arts better than the superfine on a new acquisition made by the National Gallery – an authentic and admirable van Eyck; we congratulate the directing committee, moreover, on their new acquisition of spirit and judgement, evinced in the purchase of a work not at all distinguished for vulgar attractiveness. Till within some short time, the opinion seems to have prevailed that the National Gallery should be stocked with pictures not otherwise than as a circulating library with books, that is with productions that would please the public taste whether they depraved or improved it.’ He referred with horror to the excess of ‘fourth-rate Bolognese masters’ although the proper role of a gallery should be to ‘enlighten and lead the public, not pander to it’. The van Eyck redeemed all this, and Darley ended with a neat piece of self-promotion: ‘The new star remains as yet invisible at Trafalgar Square; when it shines forth in all its splendour, we shall make our own observations upon it. We have here but to add that it is the same van Eyck so commended by us when exhibited about two years ago among the “Ancient Masters”.’
Darley was obviously in the gallery’s good books, because he was granted a preview of the painting a week before it went on show to the public at the beginning of April 1843. His ‘weekly gossip’ column for 25 March announced that ‘the celebrated picture by van Eyck purchased for the National Gallery will make its appearance there next week … by the kindness of the official authorities, we have had an opportunity for minuter inspection than we enjoyed before’. His close scrutiny confirmed that the date in the inscription was 1434 (not 1424), and therefore firmly dissociated the painting from the older van Eyck brother, Hubert, thought to have died in Italy in 1426. Although Darley misread ‘fuit’ as ‘fecit’ in the inscription, his sharp eyes recognised the tiny Passion scenes around the mirror, and the ‘Lilliputian’ figures it reflected entering the room (though he claimed to spot three, not two). As in his original review, he emphasised the nature of the medium: ‘It has a smooth,8 lucid, crystalline impasto, somewhat like enamel, as though it would break “with a glassy fracture” in the geological phrase, and possesses all the concomitant qualities, good and bad, of its style – firmness but hardness of line, purity of tone but no morbidity, exquisite but super-subtle imagination: John van Eyck’s marvellous power in simple colours evinces itself by the art he has of making yellow tell as gold – this is true alchemy!’ The realism was such that many details ‘seem to be daguerreotyped rather than painted, such is their extreme fineness and precision’. The critic had now changed his mind about the lady’s ‘embonpoint’, which was not the result of pregnancy but ‘the effect of her bizarre costume’ and the conventions of fifteenth-century art. He regarded the 600 guineas paid for ‘our van Eyck’ as a small price, considering its rarity, and ended with pride: ‘NB. It is in almost immaculate condition.’
The Art Union (‘a monthly Journal of Fine Arts’) also hailed the new acquisition; the January edition noted the purchase, although pointing out the disgraceful delay in payment, which prevented it from being hung until Hay had reached his money. The April edition announced that display was imminent, and May contained an enthusiastic review: ‘This is the most estimable9 picture lately added to the Gallery, inasmuch as works of such quality coeval with the earliest practice of oil-painting are so rarely attainable.’ It was altogether ‘a marvel in the art of painting’ whose even ‘minor beauties equal the work of those who have formed their styles on the best work of the best schools’ while the chamber and its contents ‘are made out with particular fidelity and care. We counsel all those who know John of Bruges only through the wretched forgeries circulated in his name to examine this work and say if he, in this single picture, does not surpass many whose names are lauded to the stars.’
There was also excellent coverage in the Illustrated London News, a weekly founded only a year earlier as the world’s first illustrated newspaper. On 15 April 1843, it published a long article which gave a great sense of the painting’s charisma and instant appeal. ‘A picture has been added10 to the National Gallery which affords as much amusement to the public as it administers instruction to the colour grinders, painters and connoisseurs who, since the day of its exhibition, have crowded the rooms to admire its singularity or discuss its merits. To every one it is a mystery. Its subject is unknown, its composition and preservation of its colours a lost art.’ An intriguing comment implied that James Hay had used an intermediary in his negotiations with the gallery: ‘It was bought from an obscure Belgian dealer who knew nothing of its history and sold to the Gallery for six hundred guineas.’ In some ways this makes better sense than Wardrop’s version, that Seguier approached Hay directly. The ‘obscure’ Belgian was in reality Chrétien-Jean Nieuwenhuys, one of Britain’s leading art dealers, who was selling other works to the gallery at this time (another of his clients was Robert Peel) and would buy the Coxcie copy of The Ghent Altarpiece in 1850. Nieuwenhuys was the sole source for the implausible account of Hay coming across the painting in Brussels: if he was involved in cutting a deal with the National Gallery, he would naturally have needed to establish a respectable provenance for the work.
The article speculated on what was being seen as the painting’s most intriguing feature, the identity of the man and woman. Despite the neutral title Portraits of a Gentleman and a Lady, ‘it has enjoyed at the fancy of beholders a multitude of names, and some of them not very flattering to the good taste or moral purity of the parties designated’. The writer quoted that ‘able reviewer’, Darley, on Simon Prim belatedly making an honest woman of Sarah Pure, but ‘others again are almost sure the portraits represent a mother elect consulting her medical attendant, or even honest Giovanni the painter and his wife’. However it was more likely, said the article, that the painting had a religious context, and might therefore be the wing of a devotional triptych whose central panel represented the Virgin and Child. It was typical of the fifteenth century – ‘hard in its outline, stiff, restrained … simple full and discriminative in its colouring but disfigured by mean conceits and the petty details and quaint devices of household furniture and massive costumes’. Technical excellence redeemed it: ‘A marvellous finish and a more marvellous brilliancy of colour, which the accidents of 400 years have not been able to diminish, reign through the entire composition and seem to declare with an energy which no dealer’s evidence can second that this is emphatically the van Eyck, to the exclusion of thousands which assume the name.’ An added attraction in the magazine was the first-ever reproduction of the painting; the article boasted that ‘no engraving save our own has ever been made’. The illustration was actually rather heavy-handed, and it repeated Darley’s inaccurate reading of the inscription on the wall, with fecit rather than fuit.
A better engraving was published in the same year, in the 1843 edition of Felix Summerly’s Handbook for the National Gallery. Felix Summerly was the pseudonym of the versatile Henry Cole, civil servant and ardent campaigner for art and design reform. In 1841 he began to produce an affordable series of guidebooks to collections and historic buildings in a gallant attempt to make art accessible to the working man. His 1843 guide to the National Gallery listed all the paintings, numbered according to the order of their acquisition and the last being Number 186, Interior of a Room with Figures by John van Eyck. This was ‘a perfect specimen11 of the colours of this old German painter. It is inscribed Johannes van Eyck fecit hic 1405 [sic]. Exhibited at the British Institution in 1841 and was then the property of Colonel Hay. The Government purchased it for 600 guineas.’ In his list of the artists represented in the gallery, Cole described van Eyck as ‘one of the earliest painters12 in oil, the use of which he is said, but erroneously, to have invented as a vehicle. There are evidences of oil painting existing in our own country a hundred years before his time. His pictures are remarkable for extreme care and finish.’
This 1843 edition of the handbook was the first to be illustrated with woodcuts ‘to give the general character and feeling of the originals’. Many of the entries were therefore accompanied by tiny wood engravings, no larger than around 5 x 9 centimetres, produced by the three artist sons of John Linnell (himself once a regular visitor to the Aders collection). The engraving of the van Eyck provided an inevitably simplified version of the painting, with simple vertical and horizontal lines to represent the folds of clothing, back wall and floorboards, but it managed to capture the downward tilt of the woman’s head more effectively than the much larger example in the Illustrated London News.
Cole’s combative preface to the volume defended his own popular series of handbooks, ‘being the first published below a shilling’, and attacked ‘a succession of piratical imitations of them’. The chief perpetrator, Cole alleged, was Joseph Hume, the radical MP for Montrose, who had long argued for free access to sites, monuments and galleries on the grounds of their improving nature; Cole now accused him of issuing a badly plagiarised version of the handbook in the previous year. He recorded that the gallery had attracted 540,315 visitors in 1842, and pointed out that this represented excellent value for money: ‘For the gratification, not to say improvement, of half a million of persons, the annual cost of the Gallery (exclusive of the purchase of pictures) does not exceed £1,000, or about a halfpenny each person admitted.’ However, he demanded better accommodation for the nation’s collection than its five cramped rooms of ‘diminutive size’, in which the pictures were hung without labels and with no regard to schools or dates. He agreed with his distinguished colleague Charles Eastlake that the gallery still seriously lacked early works. This was a topical point that Anna Jameson also made in her 1842 Guide to the National Gallery; she conceded the problematic nature of pre-renaissance paintings but argued that art should elevate standards rather than appeal to the lowest common denominators of popular taste, an issue that Darley had also raised.
Under Eastlake’s regime, and inspired by the enthusiastic reception of the van Eyck (the gallery’s earliest painting), the Flemish and German holdings were expanded. Eastlake did not have an easy ride in the early years: there was criticism of his emphasis on the north, especially after his purchase of a dubious ‘Holbein’, and this was followed by the great varnishing controversy. It had been customary for restorers like Seguier to apply a layer of varnish, made from resin and linseed oil, to protect paintings (then displayed without glass) from the filthy air of central London; it was also thought to give them a warmer tint, though this ominously darkened with age. The van Eyck was coated in this way before being put on display. But Eastlake, who had a fine technical understanding, and was then researching his Materials for a History of Oil Painting, cancelled this practice and established a cleaning programme (undertaken by the late Seguier’s brother). The bright new colours shocked connoisseurs accustomed to the grubby old patinas, and was ammunition in a campaign John Ruskin waged in the pages of The Times that forced Eastlake to resign as keeper in 1847.
Three years later, however, he became a trustee and was called to give evidence to the Select Committee on the Management of the National Gallery in 1852–53; the committee report vindicated his cleaning programme: ‘Of the other objectionable13 properties of the Gallery varnish, its tendency to change colour and to attract dirt, there seems now to be no question in any quarter.’ More significantly, it established an annual purchase grant of £10,000 so there was no more going cap in hand to the Treasury, and recommended that there should be a new post of director. Eastlake was appointed to this position in 1855, and soon expanded the German and Flemish collections, including two more van Eycks, Man with the Red Turban and Timotheos, expenditure which he no longer needed to justify. In 1859, the gallery attracted almost a million visitors.
IN CONTRAST TO the visual inventory of goods and possessions, the little dog who stands between the couple in the very foreground of the picture appears to be the most spontaneous item in the carefully constructed display. Unlike the sideways gaze of the man and the woman, the dog’s lustrous eyes, like miniature versions of the mirror, engage directly with the viewer, and seem to follow you around the room. The wiry russet coat, alert ears, short black nose, broad chest and wide-legged stance mark him out as a member of the breed called the Brussels griffon; the features are still carefully prescribed by the Kennel Club today. Descendant of a long line of Flanders terriers bred to catch rats, this little dog was another distinctively local product. (The breed only reached England from Belgium in the nineteenth century.) The bright eyes, gleaming coat and plumy tail suggest, almost more than any other aspect of the work, that there was an actual model for this essence of alert dogginess, a living creature longing for someone to throw a stick or, better still, for a rat to emerge from the wainscoting.
Dogs certainly featured in the art of the day. Faithful unto death, they accompanied their owners on tomb effigies, with knight and lady resting their feet on their loyal companions for eternity. Noblemen were painted with hunting hounds, their wives with lapdogs. In the sumptuous Bedford Book of Hours, begun around 1423 to celebrate the marriage of the Duke of Bedford to the Duke of Burgundy’s sister, the duchess is shown kneeling in homage to her name-saint, St Anne, who holds the infant Mary on her lap. Yet despite the solemnity of the moment, the manuscript painter has included two little dogs frolicking on the trailing hem of the duchess’s gown; one looks just like a Brussels griffon, with the same sturdy posture, reddish coat, pricked ears and erect tail as the Arnolfini dog. If this was the lapdog of choice in Burgundian court circles, a merchant’s wife might aspire to own one as well.
Yet van Eyck was also using the dog as a device to connect the modern and the biblical world, making the past present and bringing holy characters to life by associating them with familiar objects and images. This was a feature of his style, an inventive extension of what his contemporaries were doing. Among the scenes that he contributed to in the richly illustrated manuscript known as the Turin–Milan Hours was the birth of John the Baptist, which he set in a busily furnished chamber with a red-curtained bed. In the foreground were a dog and a cat.