Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jan van Eyck
Flemish; 15th-century
London, England: The National Gallery
97%
The Arnolfini Portrait. 1434. Oil on wood
The magic of the best 15th-century painting — and it literally does feel like magic, looking at art this good — pours forth from the fact that this stuff is recognizably modern, and yet it's not beset with any of the modern anxieties which artists would come to develop around depiction and its many impossibilities. There is no guile here, no winking — there is very little art. What there is is a shadowed floor and some stockinged legs, the folds of a gown and a chandelier. There is a pregnant woman and a man, as well as their dog. Light courses through the window and brightens the bricks. There is some fruit on the desk and the sill, and it's all set in very shallow space. What I'm trying to comment on isn't this painting's verisimilitude, exactly, but rather the ease with which things exist amongst things inside it, their perfect positioning within a system that occasionally points outside itself (the tips of those shoes, the sliver of background through the window, and of course the mirror) but is never self-questioning, and has no need to be. And that's not a shortcoming, but a virtue. Since every object delivers itself to you so fully, every surface gets to be a sensational delight: the weighty green folds, the adamant hardwood, every point in the chandelier. Nothing here is in contest with its own presentation as an illusion. Everything is. (TFS, 2025)
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
95%
The Goldsmith Jan de Leeuw. 1436. Oil on wood
Of all the half-dozen or so early Netherlandish paintings in its small gallery at the Kunsthistorisches, this portrait by van Eyck is the only one whose subject looks straight out at the viewer. Its value as an artwork, though, isn't reducible to the way it addresses you: there's the vague glow of its background, which makes the sitter's black garb the blacker; there's the game of van Eyck's shading, which describes de Leeuw while also averring that all about him can't be known; there's the perfect limning of the goldsmith's neck and paws, played against the fur — soft, almost vanishing — that lines his collar and sleeves. These aspects of the way the image is built, which in a limiting parlance we could call the painting's "form," contribute to an impression it gives of severity and earthly thereness, but also of the opposite of that — a threatening abyss. But there's something about the overall effect this portrait has (perhaps it's something about what it is, as such, to experience any good portrait) that feels particularly irreducible to formal language. Whatever it is, it's in that stare, those eyes: there are glints of full humanity in them, among the first not just in the history of art, but in the history of man. And painting has promise (so seems to say van Eyck) insofar as that humanity is constituted by, constitutive of, look meeting look. (TFS, 2025)
London, England: The National Gallery
92%
Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?). 1433. Oil on wood
Whether or not it's empirically true that, as Gombrich wrote, van Eyck "invented oil painting," it feels when you look at his portraits as though you're witnessing the very advent of figures occupying the same pictorial space as, and thereby being forced to establish themselves consciously against, a ground. It's in, I think, the vague glow that's there around the bulk of his subjects, and in the knowing glances they cast off the front of their depicted worlds, that van Eyck establishes the promise and the power for experience of this new problematic in the history of representations. And yet, his characters don't struggle: they're not vexed — as they'd come to be in later European painting — by this new condition they've been flung into. Instead, here, the sitter (the artist?), his face a chart in richly varied hues of the mind that's hiding behind it, purses his lips and directs his glance in full faith that his dark-cloaked shoulders will be distinguishable against the darker surface behind them. His turban is both a real thing and an astounding painterly invention. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Frick Collection
77%
The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos. c1441-43. Oil on masonite, transferred from panel
This is not among van Eyck's greatest works. It lacks the singularity of presence typical of his portraits, as well as the magical sense of depth and order — whereby space and the surfaces inside it always come to seem realer than reality — that characterizes his other Marian scenes. Comparison with the similarly arranged panel in Bruges will clarify the Frick painting's shortcomings: the shallow depth and tighter crop of the Groeningemuseum's piece forces each of its figures to assert themselves more powerfully within the volume of their room than do the characters at the Frick; the absence of much empty space has all the patterning and perfectly modeled robes vying for visual supremacy. In the Frick picture, however, the landscape that spans the whole back of the image sucks your eye away from the action and sort of disperses your vision. (Van Eyck's Madonna at the Louvre also has a far-receding background, but it's bracketed by columns and walls at left and right.) This leaves you to marvel at van Eyck's facility in rendering robes and decorated surfaces, but it saps the picture as a whole of its strength. (TFS, 2025)