Jan van Eyck was a Flemish painter, born around 1390 and dead in Bruges in the summer of 1441. He spent most of his career as court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, whose lands then covered much of today's Belgium and the Netherlands.
He made oil paint look like glass, metal and skin. Three of his pictures stand above the rest: the Arnolfini Portrait, the Ghent Altarpiece and a man in a red headdress, perhaps the painter himself, who stares straight out of the panel.
In 1434 Van Eyck painted a man and a woman standing in a room, the picture now called the Arnolfini Portrait. A round mirror hangs on the back wall, and on the wall just above it he lettered a line in Latin, Johannes de eyck fuit hic, "Jan van Eyck was here."
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The mirror shows the room from behind the couple, and two tiny figures stand in its doorway. The one in red is presumed to be the painter, because a red headdress also crowns what may be his self-portrait.
His motto, painted on other panels, plays the same game. It reads Als Ich Can, "as best I can," in the Dutch of his time, a pun on his name, with Ich playing on the sound of Eyck.
The picture is usually called a wedding portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini, an Italian merchant living in Bruges. The trouble is a date. The records show that a Giovanni Arnolfini married Giovanna Cenami in 1447, thirteen years after the picture was painted.
So the woman is probably not Giovanna Cenami, and no document names her. Van Eyck wrote that he was in the room. He never wrote who else was.
A payroll in The Hague
The painter is almost as hard to pin down as his sitters. Even his birth is a guess: between about 1385 and 1390, probably in Maaseik, a small town in the diocese of Liège, in what is now northeastern Belgium. His brother Hubert, also a painter and a few years older, is placed in Maaseik too.
The first time Jan's name turns up in writing, it is not on a picture and not in Maaseik. It is on a court payroll, far to the north, in The Hague.
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.