THE PAINTING’S CONTINUING popularity in the twentieth century was enhanced by its reproduction as an etching by the German artist Bernard Schumacher in 1901, part of a flood of new publications by print sellers hoping to cash in on a potentially lucrative market of popular artworks. The Times attacked their greed and the uneven quality of their works, but gave qualified approval to Schumacher’s plate: ‘ambitious, and we will not1 say that he has succeeded with “John Arnolfini” … but his work is careful and delicate, and we are grateful to him for having aimed so high.’ The portrait featured again in a twenty-five-piece part-work issued by the Manchester Guardian in 1903 consisting of separate sheets of photogravures: ‘Great Masters’ would ‘enable the public to collect in their homes a real Art Gallery of Gems carefully selected’ from public and private collections for a total cost of only £5. Van Eyck was represented by the Arnolfini portrait. At the same time, workshops began churning out commercial spin-offs such as heavy 90-pound ‘Gothic Art’ replica chandeliers (now fetching up to £5,000 on ebay).
In 1914 the start of the Great War disrupted the stability and permanence of the National Gallery collection, available to all, in the very heart of London. The Germans were using increasingly sophisticated Zeppelin airships for bombing raids over enemy territory; so the gallery trustees decided that it would be wise to remove the cream of the collection from the building. The Arnolfini portrait was naturally among the sixty key works initially taken off display (more were added later). Although the Air Raids Protection Committee had already arranged to allocate the most precious contents of the capital’s museums and galleries to appropriate locations, mainly underground, the National Gallery chose to ignore this and negotiated directly with the London Underground Electric Railway Company to store the painting in the tunnels of the Aldwych branch line.
However, the trustees decided to keep much of the gallery open to the public, exhibiting a representative selection of works of the various schools following safety measures such as shutting off parts of the building, and lining the walls of the main staircase with asbestos. In the absence of the stars of the collection, many of the remaining paintings were truly enjoyed for the first time. An article in the Observer entitled ‘The vanished pictures –2 a walk through the denuded galleries’ described how ‘the magnetic attraction of the world famous masterpieces is bound to interfere with the study and just appreciation of the works of those masters of the second rank, who are now left in almost undisputed possession of the walls’. Although the gallery was not damaged, the removal proved wise. While the Kaiser had kindly announced that London would not be bombed west of the Tower of London, in the autumn of 1915 his Zeppelins dropped their bombs on Charing Cross, Piccadilly and Holborn. Once the Armistice was signed, the pictures were swiftly returned, including the Arnolfini, which the Observer acclaimed in 1921 as ‘one of the most3 subtle and impressive’ portraits in the world.
In April 1924, the National Gallery celebrated the centenary of its foundation with a great banquet. Among the other commemorations of the collection’s wonderful range and variety an informal survey of ‘notable people’4 and ‘persons of taste’ was carried out to determine the nation’s favourite painting. The gallery invited eighteen luminaries to nominate the pictures that gave them the most pleasure, and in the final score (calculated on the number of mentions) the Arnolfini portrait came joint second, together with Uccello’s Battle of San Romano and Velázquez’s Philip IV. (The winner was Michelangelo’s Entombment.) Among those listing the van Eyck among their favourites was William Rothenstein, director of the Royal College of Art, Sir Robert Witt, chairman of the National Art Collections Fund, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, doughty campaigner for women’s rights.
In the hands of professional art historians, however, appreciation of the work became far more complicated because untangling its meaning, rather than just enjoying it, evolved as the main aim and led to many misunderstandings. The process began in 1934, when the March edition of the Burlington Magazine included an article called ‘Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait’. The author, Erwin Panofsky, was an eminent German scholar, educated in Berlin, but forced to flee from his position as the first professor of art history at Hamburg University when the Nazis banned Jews from holding academic positions. Panofsky escaped to New York in 1934 and moved to Princeton the following year. A specialist in the northern renaissance, including Dürer, he was concerned with the wider issues of methodology and the application of literary and documentary sources to provide a fuller understanding of an artwork in the context of its society.
He wrote the Arnolfini article in order to refute a recent claim by the French art critic Professor Louis Dimier reviving the old argument that the couple in the painting were van Eyck and his wife, and not the Arnolfinis. Citing Weale and Brockwell on the van Eycks, Panofsky demolished Dimier’s case, then went on to provide the first detailed analysis of the work’s meaning. This was a totally new reading which provided a symbolic function for every material object shown, an attempt to reconcile van Eyck’s apparent realism with the medieval Christian mindset, a concept he subsequently applied to other Flemish paintings.
He argued that the double portrait commemorated a marriage ceremony at which van Eyck was an official witness, as proved by the legalistic hand of the unusual inscription on the wall, and his presence in the mirror. This gave the painting the status of a legal document, a pictorial marriage certificate. The marriage ceremony, however, was clandestine – that is to say, private, or by common law – because it did not take place in a church and was not solemnised by a priest. To reinforce this point, Panofsky claimed that the objects in the room were all ‘disguised’ symbols referring to the rituals of marriage in a deliberately opaque way, which would not have been necessary had the event taken place in the orthodox manner. He claimed that the man’s raised hand was a formalised gesture that was part of the marriage ceremony, symbolising speech in pledging an oath of fidelity, that the lit candle was an integral part of the official process, and that all the contents of the room were typical of a nuptial chamber, its focal point being the marriage bed. He concluded that medieval spectators saw the whole of the visible world as a symbol, and that Flemish painters therefore incorporated this expectation into their work.
Dimier fought back in a letter published in the September edition of the Burlington Magazine, defending his claim by insisting that the inscription’s hic – this man – referred to van Eyck as the subject of the painting and not to here. ‘This I regard5 to be so certain that if the person represented in the picture were ever proved to be Arnolfini, I should not hesitate to assert that the inscription is false and a later addition.’
Panofsky responded in the December issue, rubbing in Dimier’s acceptance of van Mander’s inaccurate statement that the couple were being literally joined together by the personification of Faith, though a third party was obviously not present. He concluded acidly, ‘M. Dimier’s letter6 gives a wrong impression, not only of my methods (which would be comparatively unimportant) but also on the issue as such.’
For the next fifty years Panofsky’s interpretation of the scene as revealing a marriage ceremony with the aid of ‘disguised’ symbols remained virtually unchallenged and embedded in later studies. His thesis even became the foundation for his concept of iconology for understanding works of art in relation to their specific cultural background, which became his best-known, though subsequently challenged, legacy as an art historian. Perhaps the weakest point in his argument is that although clandestine marriages did take place in the fifteenth century, they were regarded as sinful and would hardly have been commemorated or commissioned from an artist as celebrated as van Eyck by the prosperous gentleman portrayed.
One fierce critic of Panofsky was Maurice Brockwell, James Weale’s former collaborator on the 1912 epic study of the van Eycks. Forty years later Brockwell published The Pseudo-Arnolfini Portrait: a case of mistaken identity. This unfurled his novel theory that van Eyck had painted two double portraits. The one in the National Gallery depicted Jan van Eyck and his wife Margaret, while the other, owned by Marguerite of Austria and taken to Spain by Marie of Hungary, showed the Arnolfinis but, according to Brockwell, it got burned in a Madrid palace fire. His cantankerous and confusing text denounced Panofsky’s seminal article as ‘the highly coloured7 and misleading effusion of an American Professor … a lengthy and untenable fiction’. He also turned on his former colleague Weale, whom he accused of leading the world astray by misinterpreting the picture referred to in the Spanish archives. The one in the National Gallery had never left the Netherlands, which was why it was still in Brussels to be discovered by the convalescent Hay. Reviews were mixed. The Observer said, ‘It is a nice exercise8 for the amateur to determine whether or not the evidence provided does in fact discredit the official provenance.’ The Manchester Guardian warned, however, ‘It is salutary9 to be reminded how few facts we really possess, but the scepticism with which the author successfully infects us when he discusses the theories of others lingers uncomfortably on when he puts forward his own.’
The Arnolfini portrait left the National Gallery for a second time in 1939. The threat this time was not only from German bombs but also from Nazi art collectors anxious to repatriate Germanic works of art. Hitler, Goering and Himmler snapped up the treasures of occupied Europe, ticking off their wish lists as they invaded country after country. The northern paintings in the National Gallery were all highly eligible, and anything by van Eyck became a prime target for the monumental art gallery Hitler planned to found in his birthplace, Linz. His targets included German, Flemish and Netherlandish paintings of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries; his minions had already seized the van Eycks’ altarpiece in Ghent cathedral, and stored some of its panels in a salt mine in Austria.
The director of the National Gallery responsible for saving the priceless paintings from destruction or plunder by the Nazis was Kenneth Clark, appointed in 1934 when he was only thirty. Combining arrogance with popular flair (his nickname was Kenneth Napoleon Clark), he and his assistant keeper, the ascetic Martin Davies, were at loggerheads. Their personalities could not have been more different; Davies was a meticulous administrator, an old-school civil servant who was distinctly sniffy about publicity while the flamboyant Clark loved it. No wonder he was later appointed controller of home publicity (aka propaganda) at the Ministry of Information. Both were, however, at one in their determination to make radical changes in the way the collections were presented. Davies, who joined the gallery in 1930 and rose to become director in 1968, aimed to rewrite the existing catalogues in a much more scholarly way. He started with Early Netherlandish paintings, went on to the French and British schools of painting and, by 1946, had published the catalogues, successfully setting new standards of quality. Others followed, including his acclaimed catalogue The Earlier Italian Schools which came out in 1951. As early as 1938, Clark selected elements from the Arnolfini portrait to include in his One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery ‘chosen chiefly for their beauty’ which he presented in the form of contrasted examples of northern and southern art (updated in 2008). Other portions of the portrait were shown in his 1941 sequel More Details.
When war with Germany seemed imminent, Clark and the gallery’s scientific adviser Francis Rawlins decided to follow their own plans to protect the collections, and to disregard the national evacuation strategy formulated as early as 1933 by the Museums and Galleries Air Raid Precautions Committee. In the gallery, they built an armoured corridor, installed new lifts to effect rapid evacuation of pictures from the upper floors, and provided new loading bays at the back. In September 1938, there was a full-scale rehearsal when many of the paintings were taken down and transported by train to various locations in north Wales: the scientist Rawlins was a railway buff who knew all the routes and timetables intimately. After Munich, the paintings were fetched back, but removed for real in August 1939, when the contents of the entire gallery were evacuated by train in just twelve days. This was just in time to protect them from the good intentions of the US government, who proposed in October 1939 that the entire collection should be shipped to America. Churchill famously commanded Clark, ‘Bury them in the bowels of the earth, but not a picture shall leave this island.’
The paintings were initially distributed between a range of safe locations, including the Gloucestershire stately home of trustee Arthur Lee, the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, the University of Wales at Bangor, and Penrhyn Castle. The latter, however, was problematic, for Martin Davies complained that ‘the owner is celebrating the war by being fairly constantly drunk’, and evidently he was the greatest threat to the paintings. Another fear was the potential impact of troops being billeted there after Dunkirk. And the alarming geographical expansion of Luftwaffe bombing raids meant that even the Welsh locations were no longer safe. Yet another worry were the locals themselves, ‘very Welsh,10 highly nationalistic, not to be trusted, and more than likely to form a Fifth Column in the event of invasion’.
In 1941, Churchill’s ‘bowels of the earth’ came true when the paintings were moved to the top-secret location of the vast caverns of the Manod slate quarry at Blaenau Ffestiniog high up in Snowdonia. Here they were safe; in all, nine bombs fell within the National Gallery building with one gallery and the rooms below being totally destroyed. Stored in six purpose-built, air-controlled brick huts and further protected by some 200 feet of rock above, the paintings were all under the careful eye of Martin Davies who took this golden opportunity to avoid his enemy Clark, prepare a new catalogue (the gallery’s library was stored in the slate mine too) and supervise the cleaning and conservation of many works. This included the Arnolfini portrait, which was restored to ‘its full brilliance’ again.
From early 1942, following a bright suggestion from the young journalist Charles Wheeler, the trustees began a ‘Picture of the Month’ scheme whereby a painting was brought down from Snowdonia to Trafalgar Square and put on show for four weeks to cheer up war-weary Londoners. This imaginative initiative was hugely popular and the arrival of each masterpiece was a news event that attracted large numbers; nearly 37,000 people saw Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus and 34,000 Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. By the end of the war thirty-seven pictures had been exhibited. The choice was heavily influenced by letters from the public who, according to Clark, wanted uplifting religious images and not ‘Dutch painting or realistic painting of any kind’. Another factor was condition; Davies thought that the double portrait of an elderly couple by Jan Gossaert, for example, was ‘irreplaceable’ and should not make the risky journey by rail from Bangor to Euston and then by road to central London. Elaborate pre cautions were taken to protect the national treasures; they were packed carefully into railway containers with strict instructions that no wet bundles were to be placed on them, and heavily guarded throughout transit. A hardened shelter was built inside Clark’s armoured corridor to safeguard them overnight, and a train was kept on hand to whisk them back to the quarry in the event of a sudden crisis. Despite these measures, in 1944 the trustees eventually decided, mainly because of the unpredictable Vrocket attacks, that it would be prudent only to exhibit good works and not the very greatest ones in the collection.
The Arnolfini was never Picture of the Month. Possibly Davies, who had the last word on whether a particular masterpiece might be damaged by travel, thought the panels too delicate, although in its lifetime the portrait had survived much more hazardous journeys than being bumped about in an LMS guard’s van. A more likely explanation is Clark’s preference for exhibiting large pictures: ‘We have found11 that small pictures, when exhibited alone in this way, look rather lost,’ he wrote. While the letters between Clark and Davies debate the proper care of the masterpieces (‘I am not eager to drive these pictures around in my Ford,’ Davies says in one) they also show an extraordinary concern for administrative details. Would the Treasury pay for an extra typist at Manod, the leave for women for domestic purposes, a magnifying glass that may have been stolen – nothing was too small to be aired. In one letter Clark devotes nearly a page to the burning issue of whether an employee called Shorey could claim for the wear and tear of his bicycle. ‘I have never heard of anyone considering seriously the extra wear to a bicycle entailed by the occasional short trip,’ he tells Davies. Sixty-five years later the portrait did make a guest appearance in reverse, a reproduction hanging on the wall of a Manod café in the BBC’s 2009 one-off comedy drama Framed, which was inspired by the relocation to the Welsh slate mine. The final scene shows that the dry-as-dust National Gallery curator Quentin Lester (curiously similar to Davies, played by Trevor Eve) has finally fallen for the charms of the pretty young local teacher Angharad. They stand together before the van Eyck as Quentin lectures his enthralled audience about its merits; then the camera pans back to reveal a pregnant Angharad, mimicking the canvas.
In May 1945 the Arnolfini was among the first fifty paintings to be hung in the two galleries that were hastily reopened after the war. ‘The speed of their return12 from their safe hold in the Welsh mountains should give a lead to other Government departments,’ said the Manchester Guardian. ‘Some of the works including the van Eyck portrait piece can be studied for a little without their glass – a high privilege.’ For its Saturday opening on 19 May the gallery, made much more popular by Clark’s policy of providing tasty sandwiches, drinkable coffee and Mozart concerts at lunchtime, was packed full with people of all classes including many enthusiastic young female workers. ‘One had almost to queue13 up for a glimpse of van Eyck who seemed to outdistance even Rembrandt and Velasquez in popularity,’ reported the Observer. ‘Flemish and Dutch were the general favourites. In these years of dust and rubble and drabness any clean bright colour has a tremendous appeal, and how rich are the red and apple-green in van Eyck’s portrait of the Arnolfinis, like an orchard’s russet kingdom for these two sombre souls!’ Cheers greeted King George and Queen Mary, and the two princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, when they attended the opening ceremony; the public mood of rejoicing was aptly summed up by the Manchester Guardian which hailed the return as ‘surely the completest14 symbol of victory in Europe’. It thought, however, that some of the paintings, while looking more brilliant than before the war, seemed oddly smaller than remembered, particularly ‘the two exquisite interiors’ by Vermeer and van Eyck. ‘Great art does not fade from the memory in five and a half years,’ it concluded, ‘yet its impact, after so long an absence, is as potent and surprising as ever.’
In 1950, the Arnolfini portrait was moved to the lavishly refurbished Duveen gallery. There it remained one of the highlights of the collection. It featured in the Twenty-Four Masterpieces publication that epitomised the gallery in 1958 and was the subject of one of the National Gallery’s ‘Painting in Focus’ exhibitions, from October 1977 to January 1978. This stimulated media debate about its meaning after the exhibition pamphlet suggested it represented not the actual moment of marriage but the state of marriage conceived of as existing over a length of time. During this period it was among the top ten of the best-selling postcards at the gallery, the Leonardo cartoon Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John topping the list. It was the centrepiece of the gallery’s rather uneven 1998 show Mirror Image, created by Jonathan Miller, which looked at the way creative people have used mirrors and reflecting surfaces, and it continued to be popular with artists everywhere. As the year 2000 approached, the Observer conducted a poll among leading British artists asking the question, ‘Which works of art15 could you not do without in the new Millennium?’ Tracey Emin replied it would be the Arnolfini.
When the gallery pioneered putting old masters onto computer screens in 1999, it devoted an interactive CD-ROM to the portrait. As Waldemar Januszczak observed in the Sunday Times, this was the perfect picture for an interactive display. ‘Not only is it packed with encyclopedia-friendly details to click on – the mirror, the dog, the chandelier, the shoes, all occupying their own, eminently clickable section of picture space – but it also boasts a polished photographic finish that appears entirely free of those recurring computer-screen irritations: brushstrokes.’ He found clicking around his new toy was ‘as much good fun as a good game of Trivial Pursuits’, but the best thing was ‘it leaves you with an irresistible urge to rush to the Gallery to see the real painting again’. Encouraged by its foray into high technology, the gallery began allowing full access to its collections over the internet and was one of the first to do so. From the start, in March 2003, when more than 192,000 people accessed the site to view the collections and buy tickets, one of most popular images to be visited has consistently been the Arnolfini.
In 2007, following Clark’s precedent of bringing culture to the masses, the picture was ‘set free’ with forty-four others (all high-quality digital reproductions) to tour the streets of central London. For three months, the faithful copy was displayed between a Japanese restaurant and a small block housing film companies at 109 Wardour Street in Soho, attracting appreciative crowds. A year later it was one of the highlights of the National Gallery’s critically acclaimed winter exhibition Renaissance Faces: van Eyck to Titian. On this occasion the catalogue offered the intriguing advice that viewers should imagine the figures undressed.
It stayed in the Duveen gallery until the new Sainsbury Wing opened in 1991. This was a purpose-built home for the medieval and renaissance collections, providing a linking sequence of rooms and galleries that created vistas to show the works to best advantage and generate the sort of comparisons and juxtapositions that Clark had pioneered in his Details books. Not everyone applauded the new home. In 2001 the art critic Brian Sewell, criticising the failure to move the portrait during the revised hanging that accompanied the refurbishment of the wing that year, complained that ‘ever since the Sainsbury Wing16 was opened this has hung in the windowless and misshapen room at its stunted south-east corner, in light so dim that it is virtually impossible to see the painting’s wonderful colour or discern its immaculately precise detail … It deserves better than this broom cupboard.’ Yet many viewers find the intimate feel of the chamber is well suited to the small size of the painting, and aids enjoyment. They are also usually impressed by the fact that van Eyck is the only northern name in the artists’ roll of honour inscribed on the outside of the building, flanked by the Italian masters Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. Today, there is always a small crowd transfixed before this familiar yet always fascinating image.
MANY COMMENTATORS UNDERESTIMATE or misunderstand the innate skills, professionalism and expertise of medieval craftsmen. The technical aspects of van Eyck’s double portrait continue to baffle those who study it, because they are reluctant to concede that such talents may be unmeasurable and autonomous. There is no evidence, for example, in the underdrawing of any ruled lines or perspective diagrams: on the contrary, the modifications between drawing to painting prove van Eyck was open and flexible. Yet contemporary art historians and mathematicians claim to identify a number of different perspectival schemes structuring the painting, ranging from the kind of one-point perspective advocated by Alberti in Della Pittura (1435) to a two-point, or elliptical perspective, and even a range of multiple points. But it is dangerous to start counting the orthogonals and imposing a grid of lines, especially as this tends to be done on smaller-scale reproductions rather than the original. Art historian James Elkins has wisely warned against turning such pictures into puzzles, pointing out that the left window produces nine major orthogonals, and the ceiling thirty-two, whereas in fact ‘we need not assume17 that he [van Eyck] had any system in mind. Yet he accomplished by eye, and with consistency between paintings, a compromise between medieval and renaissance sensitivities.’
Did he employ mechanical devices? In his book Secret Knowledge (2001), David Hockney, himself a practising artist and not a theorist, controversially claimed that from around 1430, Netherlandish painters, including van Eyck, pioneered the use of optical devices such as lenses and mirrors – the camera lucida, camera obscura and concave mirror, which can make an upside-down image for the artist to copy – in order to project the subject onto a flat surface and thus achieve a greater degree of accuracy than was possible with the human eye alone. Hockney claims that van Eyck’s invention of the ‘modern’ face would have been impossible without the assistance of such optics. Yet the many changes made to the man’s face as the work progressed disprove this hypothesis. The mirror theory is not new. In 1929, British art historian R. H. Wilenski concluded his book Dutch Painting with a chapter called ‘Vermeer’s Mirror’ which argued that mechanical devices were employed and suggested that Vermeer used more than one mirror to work out his compositions; this he inherited as part of the historic Netherlandish tradition established by van Eyck and his contemporaries.
Whatever his techniques, van Eyck’s fame meant that the portrait was already developing a reputation of its own by the later fifteenth century; the original, or copies of it, inspired other painters, who adopted both the pose of the two figures, sometimes using them as models for other historical characters in a room, and also many of the room’s contents – the convex mirror and its reflections, the interior with a bed on the right, fruit on a windowsill, the ostentatious chandelier, and the beads hanging from the wall.
Van Eyck’s reputation also swiftly won him a place in the canons of Italian humanist writing. A near contemporary, Bartolomeo Fazio, historian at the court of Alfonso V, King of Aragon, Sicily and Naples, included him in a book on eminent men (De Viris Illustribus, 1456). This had a chapter on great painters which listed two Flemings (van Eyck and van der Weyden) and two Italians (da Fabriano and Pisanello). Fazio stressed the renaissance criterion that ‘no painter is accounted18 excellent who has not distinguished himself in representing the properties of his subjects as they exist in reality’, and on these grounds van Eyck was ‘judged the leading painter of our time’. After emphasising the artist’s exemplary background and skills – ‘he was not unlettered, particularly in geometry’ – and his long training, Fazio described the works he had seen for himself. One was a triptych King Alfonso obtained from Battista Lomelli, a Bruges-based merchant from Genoa, notable for the excellent perspective, the stunning light effects of a sunbeam, and the likenesses of the donor portraits. Then there was another painting that Cardinal Ottaviano of Florence had bought from the Duke of Urbino, which seemed to have some elements in common with the double portrait: including a mirror, an ornate light, some ‘minute figures’ and a little dog. The painting did not, however, show a respectable couple in their reception room, but a naked woman emerging from her bath, with the mirror cunningly positioned to reveal her backside – so that there was nudity from two angles. This suggests it belonged to van Eyck’s ‘alternative’ range for discriminating patrons, while purportedly showing the naked Bathsheba spied upon by King David. (The actual work does not survive, but it seems to be recorded on a tiny scale in a painting depicting the crammed gallery of Antwerp art collector Cornelis van der Geest in 1615.) Other fifteenth-century Italians recorded his skills. The Florentine architect Filarete referred in his treatise De Architectura, written in the early 1460s, to the artist’s invention of oil painting. Later Giovanni Santi, father of Raphael, in his versified life of the Duke of Urbino (1482), included a section on modern painters which praised his mastery of colour. Even in his own lifetime van Eyck had achieved celebrity status both for himself and for his sitters.