Jan van Eyck

Jan van Eyck was born around 1390, probably at Maaseik in the prince-bishopric of Liège, though the place rests on later testimony. His training is unknown; his brothers Hubert and Lambert were also painters. He is documented from 1422 at The Hague, where he served John of Bavaria, ruler of Holland, as court painter and valet de chambre. After John's death in 1425 he entered the service of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, who also sent him on confidential missions, among them a journey to Lisbon in 1428-29 to portray Isabella of Portugal, Philip's future bride. He then settled in Bruges, bought a house there in the early 1430s and kept a workshop. He married a woman named Margaret, had a child in 1434, and died in Bruges in 1441, probably in early July. In 1442 his brother Lambert had his body moved inside St Donatian's.

Van Eyck is the great master of the early Netherlandish oil panel. Working in thin, translucent layers, he rendered jewels, fur, metal, glass and the fall of daylight with exceptional precision, although he did not invent oil painting, as Vasari claimed. He completed the Ghent Altarpiece (1432, Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent), begun by his brother Hubert, who died in 1426; the share of each brother is still debated. In the small Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban (1433, National Gallery, London), almost certainly a self-portrait, the frame carries his motto, Als Ich Can, a pun on his name. The Arnolfini Portrait (1434, National Gallery, London) is signed Johannes de Eyck fuit hic above its convex mirror. The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (about 1430, Louvre, Paris) shows Philip the Good's chancellor praying before the Virgin and Child, with the earthly and the heavenly worlds shared between the two halves of the panel.

Van Eyck's influence in his own century was real but diffuse. Petrus Christus is the only pupil usually named, and a workshop kept producing works from his designs after his death, possibly under his widow or his brother Lambert. Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling absorbed the example of his style, and it reached southern Italy, notably Antonello da Messina. His direct following was small, yet his handling of oil shaped northern painting for generations. For a painter in oils who reproduces him, these panels are a lesson in patience: dark grounds built up in layers, thin glazes laid over a smooth underpainting, deeply saturated reds, blues and greens, and one clear light that falls on every surface and gives each material its own weight.

Biographical details on Wikipedia.