van Eyck
Netherlandish family of artists. The brothers Hubert van Eyck, Jan van Eyck and Lambert van Eyck were all painters; a sister, Margaret, was also
identified as a painter by van Vaernewijck (1568), who
recorded that she was unmarried and was buried next to
Hubert in Ghent. The tradition that the family
originated in Maaseick [Maeseyck], near Maastricht,
seems confirmed by the dialect of Jan van Eyck’s motto
and colour notes on his portrait drawing of a man
(Dresden, Kupferstichkab.) and by his gift of vestments
to a convent in Maaseick, where his daughter Lievine
became a nun. The family belonged to the gentry: the
armorials of Jan’s epitaph in St Bavo’s, Ghent, showed
that his father or grandfather came from Brabant,
perhaps near ’s Hertogenbosch, and married a woman from
a Mosan family. It is possible that Barthelemy d’Eyck,
court painter to King René I of Anjou, belonged to the
same family.
Hubert
van Eyck
(b c. 1385–90; d Ghent, 18 Sept 1426).
Painter.
A Magister Hubertus, pictor was paid in 1409
for panels for the church of Onze Lieve Vrouwe, Tongeren,
and a Master Hubert painted a panel bequeathed by Jan de
Visch van der Capelle to his daughter, a Benedictine nun
near Grevelingen, in 1413; considering the rarity of
this given name among painters of the time, the artist
may well have been Hubert van Eyck. The designation of
Hubert as ‘Master’, his absence from guild records, the
childlessness revealed in his heirs’ living outside
Ghent and his sister’s burial beside him, all suggest
that he was in minor orders, perhaps attached to the
abbey church of St Bavo, Ghent (Dhanens, 1980). He must
have settled in Ghent by c. 1420 and shortly
afterwards begun his only surviving documented work, the
retable with the Adoration of the Lamb or Ghent
Altarpiece, which was commissioned for St Bavo’s by
Jodocus Vijd (d 1439) and his wife Elisabeth
Borluut (d 1443); to judge from its advanced
state at the time of Hubert’s death it must have been
designed c. 1423. The following year Hubert made
two designs for a picture for the town magistrates of
Ghent, some of whom visited his shop in 1425. He was
probably commissioned to paint the retable with a
painted or carved figure of St Anthony (untraced)
for the altar in the church of the Saviour, Ghent, which
Robbrecht Portier and his wife endowed on 9 March 1426.
This can hardly have been started, however, since the
retable for St Bavo’s must have occupied most of his
time until his death six months later. The painter was
buried in St Bavo’s before the altar on which the
retable was to stand, a sign of the patrons’ esteem. The
tombstone is still in the cathedral museum, bereft of
the brass plaque with its inscription declaring that
Hubert’s painting had won him fame and the highest
honour.
Jan
van Eyck
(b ?Maaseick, c. 1395; d Bruges,
22/23 June 1441). Painter and illuminator, brother of
Hubert van Eyck.
According to a 16th-century Ghent tradition,
represented by van Vaernewijck and Lucas d’Heere, Jan
trained with his brother Hubert. Pietro Summonte’s
assertion (1524) that he began work as an illuminator is
supported by the fine technique and small scale of most
of Jan’s works, by manuscript precedents for certain of
his motifs, and by his payment in 1439 for initials in a
book (untraced) for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.
Jan is first documented in The Hague in August 1422 as
an established artist with an assistant and the title of
‘Master’, working for John III, Count of Holland (John
of Bavaria; reg 1419–25), who evidently
discovered the artist while he was bishop (1389–1417) of
the principality of Liege. Jan became the court’s
official painter and was paid, with a second assistant
when the work increased in 1423, continuously, probably
until the count’s death in January 1425.
