FOR THE MIDDLE- and working-class visitors who thronged the National Gallery in the 1840s and ’50s, the domestic theme of the van Eyck and its exquisite detail appealed far more than the grandiose subject matter and dramatic techniques of Italianate canvases once owned by aristocrats. A secular portrait was also more pleasing to the Protestant ethos than van Eyck’s religious works like The Ghent Altarpiece or his sumptuous Madonnas with their dangerously Roman Catholic connotations. The exquisite precision of his painting drew comparisons with the very new medium of photography: Darley had already compared the work, then in its dignified ebony frame, to a daguerreotype. Other spectators appreciated its modernity as a moral painting on the ever fascinating topic of the ‘fallen woman’ – for some, the swollen belly beneath the green gown was indubitable proof of sexual misconduct. For all these reasons, the new acquisition was in tune with the times.
Despite its excellent content, many people perceived the National Gallery itself as unfit for purpose. A Visitors’ Guide to London, compiled in 1843, criticised the ‘paltry building …1 occupying unquestionably the finest site in the metropolis [which] from the contempt it is universally held, has been stigmatized with the damning designation of a national disgrace.’ The art critic John Ruskin agreed, referring to ‘that preposterous portico …2 those melancholy and miserable rooms’. Like so many works in the collection, the van Eyck was badly hung, ‘placed unfortunately3 under glass, and in a salon but ill-lighted’, according to a disappointed French visitor in 1855.
This did not dull the public’s appreciation, nor that of the aspiring young painters who studied at the Royal Academy Schools next door. Until 1869, the building in Trafalgar Square continued to be shared by the National Gallery and the Royal Academy. The public had access to the gallery four days a week, but on Fridays and Saturdays it was reserved for the academy. Although the divided accommodation was inadequate, the easy availability of the national collection was an essential part of the academy’s art training: the direct study and copying of old masters was considered a vital stage in an artist’s education. Students spent six years at the academy. For the first three years, they studied the antique by drawing from casts of classical sculptures, then they were permitted to join the life class, and only after that to study painting – of which the main teaching collection was the two hundred or so works in the adjoining National Gallery.
Despite poor viewing conditions, the van Eyck became an icon for a group of young academy students and their circle, whose works showed its influence in many different ways. The youngest was John Everett Millais, a former child prodigy who had joined the Royal Academy Schools when he was only eleven. His friend and fellow student was William Holman Hunt, whom Millais had met in the British Museum and encouraged to apply to the academy. Hunt was enthralled by the combination of realism and religious symbolism in Flemish painting which he saw as effortlessly achieving the truthful morality that he and Millais sought to restore to art. In 1848, the two young artists got to know the charismatic Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter, who had admired their innovative work when he saw it in the Royal Academy exhibition that year, and together they founded a secret society, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Signing their works with the tantalising initials PRB was an act of fun and rebellion against the Italian renaissance bias of official art training. The brotherhood argued that the ‘primitive’ artists of the fifteenth century, like van Eyck and his contemporaries, were infinitely finer than the overblown sixteenth-century masters Raphael and Michelangelo, the role models of the Royal Academy.
In the summer of 1849, unusually flush because they had each sold a painting, Rossetti and Hunt visited France and Belgium to see original works by the artists they admired. In the Louvre, which they found to be of a far higher quality than the National Gallery, they were impressed by ‘a tremendous van Eyck’ (The Virgin with Chancellor Rolin), and in Bruges they saw more of his work (Madonna with Canon van der Paele, and Portrait of the Artist’s Wife) and discovered Memling. In Ghent, they went to St Bavo’s Cathedral to inspect the altarpiece, which Rossetti would later recall he had seen several times with the greatest delight. This influenced the dramatic Annunciation which he painted on his return and entitled Ecce Ancilla Domini, the words that van Eyck had inscribed beside the altarpiece’s Virgin Annunciate. According to Ruskin, Rossetti also intended to paint something ‘like that van Eyck in the National Gallery with the man and woman and mirror’ but typically failed to do so; the great critic believed that the painting was a ‘judicious addition’ to a collection in which he found much to criticise.
In addition to the biblical and romantic medieval subjects of his early career, Rossetti struggled for some years on a modern morality painting, Found, on the ever popular topic of the fallen woman. Holman Hunt tackled the same theme more rapidly and effectively under the immediate inspiration of the National Gallery’s van Eyck, a work he had known and admired since its acquisition. In The Awakening Conscience, exhibited in the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1854, Hunt depicted a couple in a well-furnished room with a mirror on the back wall. The contents symbolised their relationship, and the contemporary status symbols of piano, carpet, chair and ornaments were all as minutely detailed as the bed, chest and settle in the Flemish painting. But Hunt daringly turned the scene into the exact opposite of van Eyck’s depiction of a stable marriage, for the two characters were a kept woman and the lover who has ruined her. Instead of the faithful dog, a cruel cat toys with a bird just as the man has toyed with the woman; instead of the orderly pattens and slippers, a soiled glove is tossed on the ground, just as he will toss her aside. Hunt had absorbed van Eyck’s symbolism as much as his realism. The main difference is in the scale of Hunt’s mirror, which is rectangular and takes up much of the rear wall. It reflects the window opposite and the woman’s back: the message is one of hope, that she may be able to walk into the light and away from her seducer.
If the van Eyck represented the recollection of a happy marriage for its first, widowed owners Marguerite of Austria and Marie of Hungary, it also appears to have suggested stability and calm to Hunt, then deeply troubled over his own relationships with women. Indeed, aspiring to virtue, he had decided to ‘educate’, Pygmalion-style, the pretty but common young woman, Annie Miller, who had modelled for the woman in his painting. The Awakening Conscience was not the painter’s only act of homage to van Eyck. He introduced a round mirror on a back wall into the sentimental The Lost Child (1861), and the languid Dolce Far Niente (1866); in the latter the reflection includes the statue of a married couple. In his baroque late work The Lady of Shalott, there is a dominating mirror on the wall, in this case essential to the plot, since the Lady was only allowed to view the outside world through its reflection in the glass. When she breaches the rule in order to look directly on Sir Lancelot, she is doomed to die. Hunt’s swirling, dramatic depiction of her moment of decision included another borrowing from van Eyck, a pair of pattens on the floor beside her.
Ford Madox Brown was a mentor and friend to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Having begun his art training in Bruges, he was well aware of the powerful Flemish tradition, and was another regular visitor to the National Gallery, a good place for a penniless artist to pass a few hours. A round mirror was the focal point of his painting Take Your Son, Sir!, a disturbing work which he began in 1851 but never finished; the main character is a woman whose head is framed like a halo by the round mirror on the wall behind her. Without the title, the image is puzzling; she is holding out a baby to a man who only exists through his reflection in the mirror, looking at us and therefore at her, a visual device as tantalising in terms of depth and perspective as the figures shown entering the room in van Eyck’s mirror. This painting was another meditation on relationships. The title implies that the subject was a fallen woman, a ruined creature confronting the father of her illegitimate child, yet the model was Brown’s lawful wife Emma.
A second work suggests van Eyck’s influence more obliquely. Brown set The Last of England (1855) in a circular wooden frame resembling the form of the mirror, while the subtly distorted perspective of the painting gives the impression that the whole scene is being reflected in a convex lens. The central characters are a couple, the man on the left, the woman on the right, and they are holding hands; this motif is reinforced a second time by the woman’s other hand, which clasps that of the baby otherwise concealed in the folds of her cloak. The painting is an image of marriage as much as of emigration.
By the mid-1850s, the original Pre-Raphaelites were going their own ways, but Rossetti acquired two new disciples, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, Oxford undergraduates who had decided to devote their lives to art. Morris had always been passionate about the Middle Ages. In the summer of 1854, he toured northern France and Belgium with his sister in order to see the great cathedrals and the famous Flemings van Eyck, Memling and van der Weyden, who more than fulfilled his expectations. He visited the Netherlands again two years later, and adopted van Eyck’s motto, ‘Als Ich Kanne’, As I can; this was the first half of an old Flemish saying, which concluded but not as I would. The phrase also punned on Eyck/Ich – as Eyck can – as painted on the frame of the possible self-portrait Man with the Red Turban, on display in the National Gallery since 1857. Morris included these words, translated as ‘If I can’, in his first piece of embroidery.
He also adopted elements of the double portrait into his own painting La Belle Iseult. This was his attempt to portray his love and bride-to-be, Jane Burden, the ‘stunner’ from Oxford whom he met in the summer of 1857, when she modelled for the team of friends Rossetti recruited to paint murals in the Oxford Union debating chamber. In order to present the exotic-looking Jane as the temptress Isolde, Morris included the familiar imagery of the van Eyck – a draped bed with looped-up curtains, a little dog, slippers and oranges, features which proved how he had absorbed the details, and particularly the textures of the Flemish chamber. Even Isolde/Jane’s posture echoed that of the woman in the green gown.
Morris married Jane in the spring of 1859, and on their six-week honeymoon they visited Paris, the Rhine and Bruges, ‘one of the towns which always gave Morris pleasure’ according to his colleague Philip Webb. And he later described it as ‘a really beautiful place, so clean and quiet too’. Naming one of his wallpaper patterns ‘Bruges’ was perhaps in memory of happier times as well as homage to van Eyck.
Edward Burne-Jones also loved the double portrait. Reminiscing in 1897, a year after Morris’s death, he lamented, ‘I’ve always longed4 in my life to do a picture like a van Eyck, and I’ve never done it and never shall. As a young man, I’ve stood before that picture of the man and his wife and made up my mind to do something as deep and rich in colour and as beautifully finished in painting, and I’ve gone away and never done it, and now the time’s gone by.’ This nostalgic mood inspired him to inspect the painting again, and two weeks later, killing time before a tedious committee meeting of the Royal Watercolour Society:
I went into the National Gallery5 and refreshed myself with a look at the pictures … I looked at the van Eyck and saw how clearly the likes of it is not to be done by me. I should think it is the finest picture in the world. But he had many advantages. For one thing, he had all his objects in front of him to paint from. A nice clean neat floor of fair boards, well scoured, pretty little dogs and everything. Nothing to bother about but making good portraits – dresses and all else of exactly the right colour and shade of colour. But the tone of it is simply marvellous, and the beautiful colour each little object has, and the skill of it all. He permits himself extreme darkness though. It’s all very well to say that it’s a purple dress – very dark brown is more the colour of it. And the blacks, no words can describe the blackness of it. But the like of it’s not for me to do – can’t be – not to be thought of.
Despite this self-deprecation, Burne-Jones had been adopting elements from the painting into his own work from an early stage in his career. He never trained at the Royal Academy Schools, but found free access to the National Gallery crucial to the self-education of a struggling young painter. His first major work, Sidonia (1860), adopted van Eyck’s palette of ‘extreme darkness’ offset with whites. He persuaded his father, a frame maker, to recreate the mirror on the portrait (even though it had to go back to the workshop because the ends wouldn’t meet properly) which he depicted in Fair Rosamund and Queen Eleanor (1862). Much later in life, he was enchanted by Katie Lewis, the little daughter of his business adviser, and in his 1886 portrait of her, he incorporated the motifs of a curtained, draped settle with cushions, oranges and a terrier. He paid a final tribute to the Flemish master in a diatribe against those incomprehensible modern painters the Impressionists, reserving particular scorn for Manet’s Olympe, ‘a woman sitting up6 in bed with a black ribbon round her neck … by the side of these fellows, Whistler’s a kind of van Eyck’.
After he became director of the National Gallery, one of Charles Eastlake’s innovations was to provide the paintings with labels. The text only gave the most basic facts – name of the artist and title of the work – but this was preferable to forcing interested visitors to buy the one-shilling handbook or the more expensive catalogue, which undermined the principle of free entry. The first titles given to the van Eyck had been blandly descriptive because the subject was unknown. In the Carlton House inventory of 1816, it was Portrait of a Man and his Wife, for the British Institution exhibition Portraits of a Gentleman and a Lady, for Henry Cole’s handbook Interior of a Room with Figures. In the National Gallery catalogue of 1847, compiled by Eastlake and his keeper Ralph Wornum, it became Portraits of a Flemish Gentleman and a Lady. Hailing it as ‘the oldest picture in the collection’, their entry correctly recorded fuit in the inscription. A cautious footnote added that van Mander, in his 1603 Lives of the Painters, had described the picture as showing a man and his wife, and therefore the scene might show a bridegroom introducing his bride to her new home; also taken from van Mander was the information that Marie of Hungary had bought the painting from a Bruges barber for 100 guilders.
In the same year, however, Eastlake came up with an alternative suggestion, which he published in Materials for a History of Oil Painting (1847). As the recent decipherment of fuit (was) rather than fecit (made) turned the reading of Johannes van Eyck fuit hic into van Eyck was this man, and not van Eyck made this, he suggested the couple in the room might be van Eyck and his wife. ‘The question7 is submitted to those who have given much attention to the history of John van Eyck,’ concluded Eastlake.
For a while, this became the official line, promulgated by several critics including the eminent German scholar Gustav Waagen when he discussed the painting in Treasures of Art in Great Britain (1854). As a former director of Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, home to the wings of The Ghent Altarpiece, Waagen was one of the first to appreciate the distinction between early Flemish and early German art. His book was translated into English by an old friend, the formidable Lady Eastlake. He confidently described the work as Full-length portrait of Jan van Eyck and his wife, standing in a room with rich accessories, and noted its exceptional quality. ‘This valuable picture …8 is not only executed with the greatest truth and life in every portion, even to the reflection of the figures and the room in a circular mirror … The picture also presents a fine general effect and a deep and rich chiaroscuro, which is the more remarkable considering the period.’ Then he repeated Eastlake’s van Mander reference. The 1860 edition of the National Gallery catalogue cautiously confirmed the interpretation, referring to the painting as Portraits of a Flemish Gentleman and a Lady; probably the Painter and his Wife. But it was already out of date.
In 1857, a cosmopolitan journalist, Joseph Archer Crowe, and an Italian political exile, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, came up with a radical new identification of the couple. The names of Crowe and Cavalcaselle are still cited today, and their titles are numerous. They came together as two strong-willed young men with a mutual passion for paintings, and their friendship turned into an important collaboration which made early art more accessible and popular by setting artists and their works in the wider historical context. Their pioneering survey of Flemish painters spelled out for the first time the connection between Jan van Eyck and an Italian merchant in Bruges named Arnolfini.
Joseph Crowe was born in London in 1825 but spent his childhood in Paris where his father was foreign correspondent for the Morning Chronicle, the leading Whig daily newspaper. Crowe junior wanted to become an artist, and joined the studio of Paul Delaroche, the historical painter; his training included copying works in the Louvre, where he decided that he liked the Dutch school best. After the family moved back to London in 1843, Crowe joined his father’s old paper as a crime reporter and theatre reviewer, but maintained his art studies by copying paintings in the National Gallery; here he was able to study the gallery’s new star, the van Eyck, in intimate detail. In 1846, he joined the Daily News, a radical new newspaper founded by Charles Dickens. His father suggested that he might keep up his artistic interests by writing a life of van Dyck, but, as Crowe recorded in his Reminiscences, ‘I, for my part,9 had looked with admiration at the works of John van Eyck, and thought I discovered in them a subject of study which had not hitherto been occupied … I soon came to the conclusion that a biography of van Eyck would be possible if I could make a minute examination of pictures in Belgium and Germany. I also observed that it was not so much a biography that was wanted as a history of early Flemish painting, which might be compassed by taking together van Eyck, his precursors, contemporaries and followers. Little did I then know what a wide field of inquiry I had opened for myself.’ Crowe knew French and Latin, but now gave himself a crash course in Italian, German and Flemish. He visited Bruges, Ghent and various continental galleries, and set to work.
On a second research trip in 1847, he met en route to Berlin a young Italian painter, Giovanni Cavalcaselle, who was researching ‘the lost treasures of his country’, the Italian paintings dispersed through the galleries of Europe. Meeting again in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie:
I confided10 to him that I was going to do the same thing with the Flemings. We entered. He turned to the left in the gallery, I to the right. Presently I saw him running in my way. Breathlessly he called on me to follow him, give up my stupid quest of the Flemings, and come and look at a wonderful masterpiece on the other side. But I had already found the panels of van Eyck’s Agnus Dei [The Ghent Altarpiece] and was lost in admiration of them – so much so that I stopped my friend and tried to persuade him that he was prejudiced; and to my surprise and great pleasure, I gradually saw a smile of enjoyment playing about his features … he burst out at last with the confession that he had never seen the like by a Flemish master.
Crowe struggled to reconcile his ambitious project with his day job as a journalist. In 1848, he became foreign affairs reporter for the Daily News and in 1849 was sent to Paris, where he again met Cavalcaselle, dishevelled by ‘unkempt locks11 and a bristly beard’, now a political exile because he supported Garibaldi and Mazzini’s campaign to liberate Italy. Threatened with imprisonment and even a death sentence if he remained in France, he begged Crowe to help him seek political refuge in England, where he struggled to find work as a draughtsman. Crowe lost his job in 1850, and the two young men shared lodgings, often short of money and food. But ‘we found that we could be useful to each other in art and art–literature … we hunted in couples, we went constantly to the British Museum, where we now found the studies of Count de Laborde on letters, arts and industry, under the dukes of Burgundy, and I was fortunate enough to make important literary discoveries’.
The academician Comte Léon de Laborde’s exemplary analyses and publication of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century archives of Lille, Brussels and Dijon, which appeared in 1850, revealed a wealth of detail about daily life at the Burgundian court, essential reading for anyone attempting to study van Eyck and the other Flemish painters in relation to the society and patrons who commissioned them. The meticulous ducal treasury accounts mentioned the name of van Eyck, the duke’s painter and varlet de chambre, a number of times. But Crowe’s journalistic instincts were stirred by another recurring name, that of Jehan Arnoulphin (sometimes Ernoulphin), a merchant from Lucca who lived in Bruges and was selling luxury textiles to the duke in the 1420s – goods such as ‘imperial gold cloth12 from Lucca on a vermilion ground’ or ‘an imperial cloth from Lucca on a green ground’ or ‘six pieces of tapestry’, a lavish gift for the Pope. Crowe was struck by the similarity between ‘Arnoulphin’ and the ‘Ernoul le Fin’ or ‘Arnoult fin’ who was recorded as the subject of the van Eyck painting that Diego de Guevara presented to Marguerite of Austria, according to inventories of her collections. An archivist, André le Glay, had already published these in 1839. So had Laborde.fn1 The industrious Crowe was familiar with both publications.
Putting two and two together, Crowe asserted that ‘Arnoulphin lived13 in Bruges, and John van Eyck painted both his and his wife’s likeness: the picture in the National Gallery coincides with the [inventory’s] description’ and is the reason why the painting is still known today as the Arnolfini portrait.
Yet Crowe, an amateur art historian working in initially unfamiliar territory, was afraid of appearing to contradict the received wisdom of the experts Sir Charles Eastlake and Gustav Waagen. So he kept his options open in a text packed with contradictions by adding that ‘it has been supposed14 however and with some appearance of probability, that the figures in the National Gallery are the portraits of John van Eyck and his wife; and the likeness between the female face and the portrait of the painter’s wife at Bruges bears out this supposition’, and agreed with Eastlake that ‘the signature of the painter Johannes de Eyck tends to confirm the opinion that the male figure is a portrait of Jan himself’. Yet he confusingly referred to the painting as A Newly Married Couple. He repeated the van Mander legend that Marie of Hungary had found it, though this totally contradicted his earlier suggestion that the painting was previously owned by Marguerite. He also rejected the recent interpretation of Laborde, who had personally inspected the work in the National Gallery, even managing to have the glass removed so that he could check the inscription. Laborde called it La Légitimation15 and claimed it was a historical document witnessing a marriage taking place in 1434 because of the woman’s advanced pregnancy.
Crowe’s description of the painting showed how he had learned to appreciate the development and subtlety of van Eyck’s distinctive style:
Harder outlines16 and clearer general forms distinguish this from the painter’s previous works, yet in no single instance has John van Eyck expressed with more perfection, by the aid of colour, the sense of depth and atmosphere. He nowhere blended colours more perfectly, nor produced more transparent shadows … the finish of the parts is marvellous and the preservation of the picture perfect, and there are few things more wonderful than the chandelier which hangs above the pair.
At the end of the book, almost as an afterthought, he returned to the significance of Marguerite’s inventory, but again seemed reluctant to drive the point home, although it named Ernoul or Arnoult. This unsatisfactory circular argument resulted from the delays in production and publication, the stops and starts resulting from Crowe’s more pressing commitments as a freelance journalist, combined with later editorial changes and the complex nature of his collaboration with Cavalcaselle. As Crowe defined it:
We gradually brought together17 such an additional amount of materials as made the rewriting of my earlier chapters on Flemish art necessary … To see and judge of panels and canvases and confirm or contest my opinions respecting them was Cavalcaselle’s main share in the history of the Flemish painters. He helped me at the British Museum in copying extracts and was full of zeal for this sort of work. He had also an amazing insight into the periods of a master’s career, the subject sometimes of acrimonious debate between us. But the time always came when he or I yielded, and then, the question being decided, I adopted it and set it in its proper order in the narrative which, like all others bearing our joint names, was entirely written by myself.
This was too dismissive. Cavalcaselle, whom Eastlake used to consult on Italian art, was one of the experts summoned to give evidence in the 1852–53 Select Committee on the Management of the National Gallery.
Crowe finished writing the manuscript in the summer of 1853, almost lost it in a temporarily missing portmanteau at Boulogne, then offered it to ‘the all powerful art publisher John Murray’ in October, just before he was sent abroad as war correspondent for the Illustrated London News, where he was ‘embedded’ with the troops in the Crimea and became an eyewitness to the Charge of the Light Brigade.
In June 1854, he received disappointing news: ‘Mr John Murray had refused18 to print my Flemish Painters because he held that the work required revision.’ Undaunted, Crowe set to work again after returning to England in the following year. ‘After all, my real interest19 and pleasure lay in my book which, having pulled to pieces, I now proceeded to reconstruct. I cannot say how often certain passages were cancelled and rewritten … but it was full of new and interesting matter.’ This helps to account for his contradictions over the gallery’s van Eyck. John Murray approved the revised version but the illustrations were delayed and the book did not appear until the end of December 1856, ten years after the start of the project. Crowe later mused that ‘Mr Murray assured me of his conviction that, interesting as the matter dealt with must needs be to a class, the number of readers would never be sufficiently large to yield a return. Looking into the pages of the book and considering things dispassionately after the lapse of thirty-six years, I feel surprised that Mr Murray ever published the work at all.’
The publisher’s confidence was rewarded. The Early Flemish Painters became a great success because it filled a gap in the market: it set out the historical background for the still unfamiliar concept of the Northern renaissance, it suggested that Flemish artists were innovative rather than primitive, and provided confident attributions for many contested works. It helped to promote a minor van Eyck craze. One manifestation was Charles Reade’s novel The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), which included the character of Margaret van Eyck, who passed on the secret of her brother’s magical oil techniques to the hero, scribe and illuminator Gerard. And in 1867 William Burges, architect, designer of exotic furniture and friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, recreated the Arnolfini mirror as part of a dressing table, while a workshop in South Kensington turned out commercial copies of the mirror for van Eyck fans. The book was translated into French, German and Italian, and went into a further two editions. Murray subsequently commissioned from Crowe and Cavalcaselle three major surveys of Italian art, plus studies of Raphael and Titian, all of which Crowe somehow managed to combine with a later career as diplomat and spy.
By the time he produced the first revised edition of Flemish Painters in 1872, Crowe was entirely confident about the Arnolfini identification: van Eyck’s ‘most important pictures20 were undertaken on private commission, chief of which is the panel in the National Gallery representing Arnolfi ni, a draper of Bruges, and Jeanne de Chenany, his wife’. Arnolfini was ‘a personage known on the testimony of contemporary records to have been a cloth-merchant living in Bruges’. Putting a name to Arnolfini’s wife for the first time proved that Crowe had assimilated the very latest research on the painting, undertaken by an even more obsessive van Eyck scholar, William Henry James Weale.
Weale was the son of a librarian and book collector. In 1849, at the age of seventeen, he became a Roman Catholic under the inspiration of the convert, architect and designer A. W. N. Pugin and decided to explore the medieval art and architecture that Pugin’s polemic works identified with spiritual purity. He moved from London to Bruges in 1855 to advance his studies of early Flemish art, ‘far too long obscured and undermined by lies and calumnies’, as he expressed it in typically robust manner. Another reason for leaving England was to escape the public disgrace of a three-month imprisonment for flogging a pupil at the Islington Catholic poor-school where he was the master, a controversial sentence which reflected the anti-Catholic mood of the day. In Bruges, the local community regarded him as ‘a rather troublesome21 and meddlesome young foreigner’ because of his protests against their attempts to modernise and ‘improve’ the town.
In 1861 Weale published Notes sur Jan van Eyck, a sarcastic, point-by-point refutation of the views of the Abbé Carton, distinguished member of the Belgian Academy, who had written on the van Eyck brothers in 1847. Carton’s crimes included misreading the date and signature of the National Gallery’s painting and citing van Mander as an authoritative source. Weale also savaged Laborde on the grounds of inaccuracy, and dismissed the National Gallery’s catalogue entry. But he did agree with Crowe’s identification of the man as Arnolfini of Bruges, and provided details of the life and career of Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini, whom he believed to be the man in the painting. Drawing on local documents, he proved that this merchant from Lucca was active in Bruges from the 1420s, married Jeanne de Chenany (a misprint for the actual family name, Chenami), became a member of the Duke of Burgundy’s council, and died in 1472. His wife survived him and was still living in 1490. As for the inscription’s fuit hic, Weale took this as a reference to the presence of van Eyck as one of the tiny figures in the mirror entering the room to join his friends the Arnolfinis. He also provided the important new information that the painting was among those Marie of Hungary took to Spain in 1556, as listed in the posthumous inventory of her possessions, published as recently as 1856 after it was discovered in the Spanish National Archives at Simancas.
The National Gallery totally accepted his findings. The 1862 edition of the catalogue called the work Portrait of Jean Arnolfini and Jeanne Chenany and acknowledged that ‘the researches of Mr Weale22 have proved beyond all question who the personages represented in this picture were’. No longer did Crowe need to worry about contradicting the gallery and so he happily confirmed Arnolfini’s identity in his revised edition of The Flemish Painters.
Weale remained immersed in Flemish studies. He made an enormous contribution to the cultural and antiquarian life of Bruges, but after his prickly personality lost him the post of town archivist, he returned to London in 1878. He later served for seven years as keeper of the National Art Library in the South Kensington Museum, but was sacked in 1897 for being too active and typically outspoken to his employers. This was the opportunity to start writing up his life’s work, forty years of research into the van Eycks. Despite a terrible setback – at the last moment he lost his copious bibliography in an omnibus – he published his major study, Hubert and Jan van Eyck: their life and work in 1908. Describing the Arnolfini portrait, he accepts the then received wisdom that it is a study of ‘a newly married couple’. He concludes, ‘The colouring of this23 marvellous interior is full of vigour and blended with the utmost care. The fresh tints are admirable and in their rendering show a remarkable transparency of shadow. The picture, in short, is an exquisite gem in the finest state of preservation save in one place, across the mirror.’ The tome as a whole, however, was so indigestible that his publisher John Lane of the Bodley Head commissioned a more accessible edition, and appointed a collaborator, Maurice Brockwell, to help him.
Brockwell was a knowledgeable colleague, ‘an indefatigable researcher and pungent writer and lecturer’ according to his obituary in The Times, who dazzled audiences by speaking entirely without notes. The National Gallery employed him to rewrite many of its catalogues, then he worked in Florence as librarian and assistant to the renaissance scholar Bernard Berenson. He was also a regular contributor to the Athenaeum. Almost forty years younger than the bearded, shambling, short-sighted Weale, the dapper Brockwell was ‘a tall erect man of fine presence and handsome features’, with a private passion for horse racing. As he was as opinionated and extreme in his views as Weale, the imposed collaboration created intolerable strains (especially as Brockwell’s review of the book for the Athenaeum had described it as ‘long and whole-hearted, even if uninspired and unexacting’). Yet in the end it produced a more viable book, and Brockwell always referred to Weale with respect. They identified just twenty-four surviving works by the van Eycks, the restraint of this figure enhanced by an appendix which listed the 400 pictures variously ascribed to the brothers in the years between 1662 and 1912: ‘A century ago24 practically all early pictures of the Netherlandish, German, French and even Spanish, Portuguese and English schools’ were assigned to van Eyck, Dirk Bouts or Memling. For the moment, Brockwell accepted the official line that the portrait showed the Arnolfinis. But he would change his mind.
The Arnolfini portrait remained a major attraction. When the galleries were rehung in 1876, it was described as one of ‘the gems of the collection’. It was illustrated, among ‘forty-two choice reproductions’, in one of the Pall Mall Gazette’s ‘Extras’, or special supplements, in February 1890, ‘Half-Holidays’ at the National Gallery. The aim was to provide a popular and well-produced guide, at a cost of only sixpence, so that industrious visitors might master the entire collection in the course of twelve afternoons: the Flemish school was recommended for the sixth visit. This evidently fulfilled a genuine need, since according to one newspaper ‘the National Gallery guide-books25 have been a disgrace both to the Gallery trustees and to the Nation’.
Stung by such comments, in 1899 the gallery produced a new and fully illustrated edition of the catalogue, with a preface by the director, Sir Edward Poynter. In it he described the van Eyck as ‘one of the most26 precious possessions in the collection and, in respect of its marvellous finish, combined with the most astounding truth of imitation and effect, perhaps the most remarkable picture in the world’. The catalogue earned a mention in the Manchester Guardian’s ‘books of the week’ review in January 1900; criticising the inevitable small-scale reproduction of many paintings, the reviewer praised the full-page illustrations, an ‘honour here accorded27 only to a few of the greatest treasures – such as van Eyck’s Jean Arnolfini and his wife’, and repeated Poynter’s praises. Someone who agreed was the great financier and discriminating collector Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild MP, of Waddesdon Manor. His obituary in The Times recorded his opinion that the Arnolfi ni was the ‘one picture28 in the National Gallery for which I would pay literally any price and commit any folly’.
THE FIRST STAGE in the production of a painting was the contract between artist and client. This might specify the timescale, the quality of the materials to be used, the extent of the master’s own involvement (rather than that of his assistants), and when the payments were to be made (normally in three instalments). van Eyck’s workshop was part of his house, in St Gilles Nieuw Straat. The room where he painted was probably north-facing and on an upper floor in order to obtain the best natural light. At any one time it would contain a number of works in progress: as each layer of oil paint took a long time to dry (more slowly in the winter than the summer months), and as van Eyck used many layers, he needed to have several projects underway at the same time. He employed a number of assistants whose duties ranged from cleaning and tidying to preparing paints and perhaps working, under his supervision, on the backgrounds of larger panels as part of their training. In the late fifteenth-century painter’s workshop observed by Jean Lemaire de Belges, librarian to Marguerite of Austria (second owner of the Arnolfini portrait), there were straw mats on the floor to control the dust, a number of wooden easels, and planks leaning against the walls to support the paintings in progress.
The subjects of van Eyck’s portraits would have been unlikely to visit the workshop for a sitting. He would have gone to them in order to make a preliminary drawing, as he did for his portrait of Cardinal Albergati (1438, Vienna), whose drawing has miraculously survived (Dresden). For this, van Eyck used silverpoint (a narrow strip of silver inserted in a metal or wooden holder, like lead in a pencil) on paper rubbed with white chalk to prepare the surface. And he made precise notes on the colour tones required, standard practice if a busy sitter did not expect to be present for the painting stage; there was no point wasting time and materials on preliminary painting when the written word could effectively prompt a well-trained visual memory. To the right of the Albergati drawing are van Eyck’s aides-mémoires, reading rather like a poem:
The nose dark29 sanguine
Like the cheekbone down the cheeks
The lips very whitish purple
The stubbly beard rather greyish
The chin reddish
He probably started with just such a preliminary, colour-annotated drawing of the Arnolfinis, grand people who could hardly be expected to show their faces to him for too long.
Next was the making of the wooden board (or the selection of a previously prepared one) on which to paint the portrait. The board of the double portrait was made of oak, the wood Netherlandish painters favoured; the Italians preferred poplar, Germans limewood. The Hanseatic traders imported painters’ oak from Poland and other Baltic countries with slow-maturing trees. The wood had to be so thoroughly dried out and seasoned that it could not be used for at least ten years after felling. Narrow-grained timber was best because it was less likely to shrink. The board consisted of three panels joined together by tiny mortice-and-tenon joints. The original frame does not survive, but van Eyck often used wood from the same plank for the painting board and for the frame. Then he or his assistants planed the board, rubbed it down and covered it with layers of warmed animal glue, then a ground of glue and chalk which hardened when it dried. Smoothed down, this concealed any trace of the wood grain, and became the basic surface of the painting.
Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Cardinal Albergati, c. 1435
On this prepared layer, van Eyck made an underdrawing of the whole scene, laying out the image in advance in order to structure the composition and decide where to put the light and dark areas. Although the subsequent layers of paint and varnish obviously concealed what was underneath, in the 1950s twentieth-century advances in the scientific analysis of paintings first made it possible to see through these layers and recreate the whole sequence of work. The underdrawing of the Arnolfini portrait was revealed by infrared photography, a technique which initially had its limitations because it could not penetrate certain pigments, particularly blue and green. From the 1960s, the more advanced and sensitive technique of infrared reflectograms was developed; these miraculously render most pigments transparent and reveal the entire underdrawing, recorded as a series of digital images.
The Arnolfini reflectograms reveal how much van Eyck modified his original underdrawing or chose to ignore it altogether as work progressed and he followed his creative instincts. Looking over his shoulder, we know he made very detailed underdrawings, using cross-hatched lines to indicate the darker areas and to give a three-dimensional sense. Using a brush and liquid (others might employ dark chalk or metalpoint), he outlined the layout and contents of the room, using parallel strokes and hatching to suggest depth. Yet there are surprising omissions: the chandelier, the pattens and sandals, the oranges, the amber beads, the chair by the bed, and the dog were absent from the drawing. The dog must have been inserted at a very late stage indeed, because it does not even feature in the mirror’s otherwise accurately reflected view of the room.
There were significant changes between the underdrawing and the final painted version in the form of changes in scale and size. The mirror was originally larger, with eight lobes round the frame rather than ten. The brush was bigger, the rug longer, the window and shutters had different proportions, the base of the chest was another shape. The greatest modifications, however, were to the man and the woman. Evidently dissatisfied with his preliminary drawing of Arnolfini’s striking features, van Eyck moved the eyes, nose and mouth further down. They still seem too large in relation to the size of his face, and to his extremely narrow shoulders, which were also lowered for the painted version. He made the straw hat more impressive by extending its brim and crown, he lowered the hem of the tabard and changed the position of the feet, bringing them closer together to achieve a more elegant stance. He twisted the palm of the man’s raised right hand further from the viewer, and made the left hand fold more tightly around that of the woman. Her face was originally smaller and tilted. van Eyck decided to place her eyes higher up her face (although her forehead still remains implausibly deep) and made them look more towards the man. The hand which, not very convincingly, holds up the heavy fabric of her gown over her stomach, originally did not grasp the material at all but pointed downwards. What this all shows is a confident and flexible artist not adhering rigidly to his original design but viewing it with fresh eyes and modifying as necessary. It was not a case of altering mistakes but adapting to a fresh imaginative vision.
When he was satisfied with the drawing as a basis, van Eyck began to paint. Despite later legends, he was not the inventor of oil painting. In his Lives, Vasari announced that van Eyck had found the secret recipe, which he eventually revealed to Antonello da Messina, who passed it on to Veneziano, whom Castagno murdered for the secret formula. But this was really Vasari’s way of lauding Antonello’s contribution to the development of Italian art. Medieval craftsmen would certainly have guarded their methods, but the real flaw in the story was the fact that Antonello was only a boy when van Eyck died. Paints made from a mixture of linseed oil and ground pigment had been known since at least the thirteenth century, with their use expanded in the fifteenth century, thanks to a range of new recipes which enabled the paint to set more firmly. van Eyck’s particular contribution to the medium was to realise that some pigments became virtually transparent in oil, and that by applying a series of very thin layers, working from opaque to translucent, he could achieve an exceptionally luminous and permanent finish. Another advantage of working in oil was the long time it took to set, with the result that an artist could continue manipulating it until he achieved just the desired effect. This was done not only with brushes: van Eyck’s fingertips have left their imprint on the green gown.
Artists prepared their own paints in the workshop, the kind of task van Eyck’s assistants would have helped with. On a slab of stone or marble they pounded and mixed the pigments with linseed oil, then stored the finished products in jars covered with pigs’ bladders to keep them moist. Pigments normally came from minerals, and some were more precious than others. A respected artist like van Eyck would have been expected to use the very best quality available (the contract probably insisted upon it), and the markets of Bruges were a cornucopia. Paint sampling has shown that the blue of the woman’s sleeves was ultramarine made from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone from Afghanistan (often mentioned in contracts to avoid inferior substitutes made from azurite or blue glass). The green of her gown was made from ground copper, the reds of the textiles from a mix of silver and sulphur. Like kermes itself, this was more expensive and effective than an ochre-based pigment. Even van Eyck’s brushes were costly, with tips of sable or miniver inserted into quills attached to a wooden handle.
fn1 As a good Frenchman, Laborde tried to be fair to Marguerite of Austria: ‘For twenty-five years she worked for the good of the house of Austria to do all the harm that she could towards us, and she pursued this work with all the passion of a woman’s heart. However this was not a crime, and we should respect her patriotism.’ (1850, 89)