Discovering London’s Art Gems: Van Eyck’s Original Selfie-Portrait

In an age when everyone has a camera in their back pocket it’s hard to imagine a time when the only lasting memento of ourselves was portraiture. Only the rich could afford such a time-consuming expense so everyone else was simply lost to antiquity. Be thankful that they were. A few minutes in the National Portrait Gallery will show you how repetitive portraiture can be but there’s one portrait in the National Gallery that’s kept critics on their toes for years.

At first glance there isn’t much to recommend Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. The only noticeable difference from other paintings in Room 56 is that there are two people depicted and they aren’t from the Bible. Big deal. But the closer you look the more unusual this picture gets.

 

 

Who’s Who

There’s a lot of debate about who the subjects of The Arnolfini Portrait actually are. Critics once thought it was a marriage portrait bearing witness to an exchange of vows (never complain again about posing for wedding photos). The problem is that none of the Arnolfinis, the familyof rich Italian merchants who gave the picture its name, got married in 1434 when it was painted.

Luckily van Eyck did a lot of portraiture and the man in The Arnolfini Portrait (left) is unusual looking to say the least. One glance at the artist’s lesser-known portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini (below) rather gives his identity away – there can’t be two people who look like that. That means the woman beside him is Nicalao’s second wife, though a new theory from 2015 suggests it’s actually his deceased first wife. She died in childbirth and the picture is littered with traditional symbols of babies and birth. If this is the case, the portrait switches from a celebratory picture of married life to a creepy commemoration of a couple – one living, one dead.

The strangest thing about The Arnolfini Portrait is that, even though there are allusions to childbirth, the woman featured isn’t pregnant. The “baby bump” is actually a lot of excess material that she’s holding up to her belly. The fashion at the time was for ridiculously voluminous dresses: women needed servants to trail after them holding up their trains. Wimbledon School of Arts tried to recreate the dress from The Arnolfini Portrait and it took more than 35 metres of material. The longer the train, the more wealthy you were thought to be so believe it or not, Nicalao’s wife would have been flattered by this portly portrayal.

A Mischievous Master

All of this is fairly interesting but the real intrigue of the portrait isn’t the people but the painter. Jan van Eyck was a revolutionary artist who influenced many of the greats. He was one of the first to use oil paints for portraiture and had an incredible eye for detail. He was also endearingly quirky. Van Eyck was the only Dutch painter of the time to sign his canvasses and he did so with flourish.

On the Arnolfini Portrait his signature is inexplicably daubed across the back wall and reads in Latin “Johannes van Eyck was here”. It turns out van Eyck was the original graffiti artist. All those hastily written tags sprayed onto railway walls or carved into school desks are clearly classical reproductions.

To properly understand van Eyck’s dedication to detail, you’ll need a magnifying glass. Just underneath his tag on the wall is a convex mirror that’s often overshadowed by the rest of the composition but it’s a whole artwork in itself displaying a mastery of paint and portraiture that few have replicated since.

Surrounding the mirror are 12 individual paintings depicting the Passion of Christ, a subject that other artists dedicated entire careers to but that van Eyck fitted into a fragment. In the glass itself is a reflection of the entire room in phenomenal fish-eye detail. We can clearly see the couple holding hands, the  window, chandelier, bed – and two mysterious phantom figures.

Van Eyck was clearly fed up of being always the artist, never the artwork. To make sure he got a taste of eternity he painted himself into The Arnolfini Portrait, perhaps knowing it would become his most infamous work. Van Eyck is one of the two tiny people revealed in the mirror but out of frame (the other person is unidentified). He wasn’t just being realistic in showing the entire reflection. Magnification shows that one of this miniature Master’s hands is raised up in a wave – a hello to future generations to say “Jan van Eyck was here”.

Seek out the incredibly intricate Arnolfini Portrait at the National Gallery and pay homage to Jan van Eyck: court painter, graffiti artist and king of the secret selfie.

by Jo Davey

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