Jan van Eyck was a Flemish painter, born around 1390 and dead in Bruges in the summer of 1441, who worked for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. He is remembered for making oil paint look like glass, metal and skin, and for three pictures in particular: the Arnolfini Portrait, the Ghent Altarpiece and a man in a red hat who stares straight at you. He is also the painter who wrote on a wall that he had been there.
In 1434 Van Eyck painted a man and a woman standing in a room. Above the round mirror behind them he lettered a line in Latin, Johannes de eyck fuit hic, "Jan van Eyck was here." In the mirror, two tiny figures stand in the doorway, and the one in red is presumed to be the painter.
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That line is the nearest thing to a voice he left us. On other panels he painted a motto in Middle Dutch, Als Ich Can, "as best I can," a pun on his name. On the wall he went further and wrote himself into the room.
Everyone calls the painting a wedding portrait, and the man is usually named as Giovanni Arnolfini. But the records show that a Giovanni Arnolfini married Giovanna Cenami in 1447, thirteen years after the date on the wall.
If the woman in the picture is not Giovanna Cenami, she has no name. Van Eyck wrote that he was there. He never wrote who else was.
What You'll Discover
What nobody knows about his first years.
Why a duke sent his painter abroad.
Whether he really invented oil painting.
Who the woman in the room was.
Whether his brother painted the altarpiece.
Where the stolen panel went.