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Jan van Eyck
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.
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.
