Works by Jan van Eyck

Jan van Eyck laid his oil paint in thin, see-through glazes, and he was the only Netherlandish painter of his century to sign his panels, often with the punning motto ALS ICH KAN, "as I can".

The Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon, from around 1430, is probably the oldest of his portraits to survive: a three-quarter view against flat black, light from one side, a day or two of stubble on the chin. In Léal Souvenir of 1432 the sitter grips a small scroll, perhaps a legal paper, above a ledge painted as cracked stone with words that seem cut into it. Van Eyck painted his wife in red with a ruffled white headdress in the Portrait of Margareta van Eyck, and its frame, in Greek letters, has her say that her husband Johannes finished her on 17 June 1439, when she was 33. He changed the angle of her nose and gave her the high forehead then in fashion.

Mary is the central figure of most of his religious works. Her crowned head nearly reaches the gallery in the Madonna in the Church, as if she were the building itself, while daylight lies in pale patches on the floor. The church is invented, with round arches stacked over pointed ones. Above the convex mirror in the Arnolfini Portrait he wrote in Latin, in a script kept for legal papers, that Jan van Eyck was here, 1434. Portraits and devotional panels from the 1430s follow in roughly even measure; a few are thought to have been painted or finished by his workshop after he died in 1441.

Sources: Wikipedia, Groeningemuseum, National Gallery, Brukenthal National Museum, Gemäldegalerie Berlin.