Jan van Eyck
c. 1390–1441 — Flemish Renaissance painter
The Northern revolution in oil.
The painter of the The Arnolfini Portrait and one of the defining figures of the Northern Renaissance.
Life
Jan van Eyck was born around 1390, probably in Maaseik in the County of Loon (modern-day Belgium). He entered the service of John of Bavaria, Count of Holland, around 1422, and after the Count's death in 1425 became court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy — one of the most powerful patrons in Northern Europe — a position he held until his death in 1441.
Van Eyck is credited, alongside his brother Hubert, with the perfection of the oil painting technique that would define Northern Renaissance painting and, eventually, the entire European tradition. Applying oil-based pigments in thin, translucent layers that could be built up gradually and reworked over extended periods, he achieved a descriptive precision and a luminous depth that no earlier medium — tempera, encaustic, fresco — had made possible. The Ghent Altarpiece, completed in 1432, is the founding document of this achievement; the Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 is its most complete demonstration.
Van Eyck's painting did not merely reproduce the surfaces of the visible world; it organised them. His interiors are light-filled, geometrically coherent spaces in which every surface — wood, metal, glass, cloth, flesh — has been observed with an attention so exact that the painted image constitutes a kind of knowledge about the world rather than merely an image of it.
Major paintings
The major paintings of Jan span the full range of Northern Renaissance art — from early works in the Flemish tradition to the mature style that defined his period.