A lecture presented by The Arts Society Ealing
This November, the National Gallery in London will attempt something that has never been done before and by the institution’s own assessment, will never be done again: it will gather in a single building all nine surviving independent portraits by Jan van Eyck. The paintings are scattered across five museums in four countries – London, Vienna, Berlin, Bruges, Sibiu – and several have not travelled in decades.
The Arnolfini Portrait has left the National Gallery only once in over a century. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has agreed to lend both its Van Eycks simultaneously for the first time in its history. That such an assembly requires the word “only” to describe nine objects tells us something about the scale of loss that six centuries have inflicted on the work of a single painter – and something about the preciousness of what remains.
The modern visitor, arriving at Trafalgar Square in late November, will likely bring with them a set of assumptions about what a portrait is. A portrait, we tend to think, captures a likeness. It records how someone looked. It is a picture of a face. These assumptions are not wrong, exactly, but they are radically incomplete when applied to the nine panels that will occupy the National Gallery’s rooms. To understand what Van Eyck achieved, you must recover a world in which a painted face was not a picture but a device – a legal document, a diplomatic instrument, a store of status, a surrogate for the living body. The question this talk pursues is not ‘what do these portraits look like?’ but rather: what were they for?
Lecturer, Mariska Beekenkamp-Wladimiroff has her own company – Art Historical London – offering art historical lectures, museum visits, courses, tours, travel and events from Amsterdam, London and New York, and since 2020 online. She also teaches on the public programme of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, for Roundtable, the Timken Museum and the New York Adventure Club in the States, for Academy Travel and the Art Academy in Sydney and for a number of institutions in the Netherlands.
This lecture ties in with the forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery.
Doors open at 6:45pm, and lecture starts at 7:30pm.
Visitors are welcome to attend at £10 per lecture (£3 for students); payment can be made by card on the evening.