Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jan van Eyck
Flemish; 15th-century
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)