Jan van Eyck, court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was the most technically accomplished painter of the fifteenth century and the artist who established oil painting as the supreme medium of European art. Working in Bruges from the late 1420s until his death in 1441, van Eyck developed a method of building up translucent glazes of oil paint that achieved an almost gemlike luminosity — surfaces that seemed to glow from within, rendering every detail of the visible world with a precision that no painter had previously attempted.
The Ghent Altarpiece (completed 1432), begun by his brother Hubert and finished by Jan, is one of the most ambitious paintings ever created: a multi-panelled polyptych whose open state reveals the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in a vast, flower-strewn landscape of crystalline clarity. The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) remains one of the most discussed paintings in art history — a double portrait of a merchant and his wife in a Bruges interior, filled with symbolic objects reflected in a convex mirror, signed with the enigmatic inscription “Jan van Eyck was here.”
Van Eyck’s influence was immediate and far-reaching. Italian painters were astonished by the Flemish technique: Vasari (incorrectly) credited him with inventing oil painting altogether. His microscopic naturalism — the individual hairs of a fur collar, the reflections in a suit of armour, the veins in a marble column — represented a way of seeing the world that was no less revolutionary than Masaccio’s perspective, and his legacy runs through the entire tradition of Northern European painting.