Reaktion Books’ Renaissance Lives series, which includes Alfred Acres’s Jan van Eyck within His Art, aims to “explore and illustrate the life histories and achievements of significant artists, intellectuals and scientists in the Early Modern world.” It is a tall order indeed to consider and condense the massive literature on the work of the premier painter of the Burgundian Netherlands into a concise text of 193 pages, but Acres does this with aplomb in seven beautifully written chapters on Jan van Eyck and his work. Acres’s engaging examination of Jan’s art is mainly through pictorial analysis and insightful observations, and although the book alludes briefly (and mainly in endnotes) to recent scholarship on provocative issues pertaining to Van Eyck’s work, it does not debate or critique these to any great extent – a matter that may disappoint scholars in the field. This is all the more notable because of three major events pertaining to recent Van Eyck scholarship: the ongoing cleaning, restoration, and technical study of the Ghent Altarpiece being carried out since 2012 through the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK/IRPA) in Belgium; the parallel VERONA (Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access) project that studied all of Jan’s other paintings (as well as selected workshop production) through technical investigations; and the ill-fated 2020 exhibition Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, which closed prematurely due to the COVID outbreak. The Closer to Van Eyck website provides access to all of the latest information about the Ghent Altarpiece and VERONA projects. These resources have stimulated an explosion of new scholarship on Jan’s paintings as well as reassessments of his life and career. This means that Acres’s book, while serving as a helpful starting point for an assessment of Jan van Eyck’s career and oeuvre, must necessarily be augmented by the numerous publications that bring the interested Van Eyck student and aficionado up to date.

The book’s Introduction provides the raison d’être for its title: Jan van Eyck within His Art. A common thread throughout the text is what Acres describes as Van Eyck’s presence in his paintings in one way or another, sometimes through reflections, occasionally as one of two subsidiary figures, and most decisively through the artist’s signature and motto. It is here instead of in the portraiture chapter that Acres discusses the famous Man in the Red Turban (National Gallery, London) as the self-portrait of the artist, making compelling arguments for this identification through pictorial analysis. He then links it to other tiny red-turbaned figures of Jan reflected in St. George’s armor in the Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele and at the middle-ground wall in the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin, and to the two additional figures in the Arnolfini Portrait, reflected in the mirror, one of whom Acres also assumes must be Van Eyck. These are the observations of traditional scholarship but an opposing view has been proposed by Stephan Kemperdick (at symposia in Ghent [2022] and Bruges [2024], and in a Courtauld Institute of Art lecture on November 26th, 2023), who does not accept the National Gallery painting as a self-portrait of Van Eyck, and suggests that the Arnolfini man and woman are in fact Jan van Eyck and his wife Margaret. The argument is complex and not wholly convincing, but it does remind us that the identification of the figures in the so-called Arnolfini Portrait is still open for debate.

What can be known about Van Eyck’s life and career is the subject of Chapter One where Acres reviews the documentary evidence and acknowledges the open questions about the artist’s beginnings. This, too, is an area of ongoing investigation. Acres mentions Hendrik Callewier’s recent discovery in the Vatican Archives of Van Eyck’s request for a confessional letter on behalf of himself and Margaret from Cardinal Albergati near the time of Jan’s death, but still to come and eagerly awaited is the volume by Jan Dumolyn and Jacques Paviot – Corpus documentorum eyckianum – that will ultimately provide all of the known documents with detailed commentary.

To date there has been burgeoning literature on Van Eyck’s technique and working methods, due in part to the cleaning and restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece as well as the VERONA project, and to other recent restorations of paintings, such as the Berlin Portrait of Baudouin de Lannoy and the Paris Rolin Virgin, both of which have been transformative in terms of judging Van Eyck’s technique and execution. Acres begins with the one extant drawing uniformly given to Van Eyck, the Dresden Portrait of Cardinal Albergati (although the sitter’s identification has also been questioned by some).^[1] The more controversial attribution to Van Eyck, briefly mentioned by Acres, is the Crucifixion drawing in Rotterdam. New comparisons of the drawing to the underdrawings in Van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgment (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and further proposals concerning the subject, date, and function of the Rotterdam sheet are offered for consideration in a recent essay of mine.^[2] In terms of preparatory stages of work, Acres zeros in on Van Eyck’s remarkable underdrawings in the Arnolfini Portrait and in the Rolin Virgin. The changes Van Eyck made during the creative process continue to intrigue us. Not the least of these is Rolin’s purse, so prominent in the underdrawing but not executed in paint. Diane Wolfthal has recently taken up this question in her paper at the 2024 Chicago RSA conference, indicating that it was not merely a question of decorum in consideration of the presence of the Virgin as noted by Acres. She argued instead that the deletion of the purse reflected Rolin’s concern for its implication of his avarice and, in particular, his sullied reputation for taking a bribe just at the time that the painting was being made.

Jan van Eyck’s extraordinary ability to render a luminous naturalism in his paintings has placed this artist above all in his own time. This book reinforces the “genius status” of Van Eyck by only discussing the “masterpieces” of his oeuvre with no mention given to more controversial attributions such as the Rotterdam Three Maries at the Tomb. Acres mentions assistants in the workshop – possibly as many as five – but what exactly they did is not at all clear. A longstanding question of greater importance is exactly what division of labor existed between Jan van Eyck and his brother Hubert concerning their work on the Ghent Altarpiece. Although Chapter Three does an admirable job of parsing the mountain of literature on the Ghent Altarpiece to make a thoughtful presentation of a complex work, it sidesteps the question of authorship, merely mentioning the exciting new foray into this tricky question by Griet Steyaert and Marie Postec that distinguishes the facture of Hubert from Jan (p. 206, note 8). Engaging with this question also necessitates a clear understanding of the state and condition of the altarpiece. A great deal of attention has been given to the discovery mentioned by Acres that the lamb on the altar in the central panel was repainted in the mid-sixteenth century, producing a more naturalistic-looking animal. Just why this was undertaken and by whom is a matter considered recently by Barbara Baert.^[3] However, equally important and not discussed by Acres is the discovery that considerable portions of the altarpiece were overpainted in the sixteenth century, most likely by Jan van Scorel and Lancelot Blondeel around 1550 as part of a major “restoration” project. This means that art historians have long mistaken the overpainted portions of the Ghent Altarpiece as Hubert and Jan’s execution when in fact it was the work of later artists. The altarpiece is now being carefully treated to recover the Van Eyck brothers’ work, a change that will doubtless lead to new conclusions about facture and meaning.

Chapter Four, “Annunciations and Other Encounters,” considers the Washington and Thyssen Annunciations as well as The Met Crucifixion and Last Judgment and the Holy Face (known only in copies after Van Eyck). In evidence again is Acres’s beautifully written pictorial analysis that engages readers with the details of these works, seamlessly providing references to the conventional published scholarship. What is missing, in particular for the Crucifixion and Last Judgment as well as the Holy Face, is any discussion of the function and context of these paintings, particularly as related to contemporary religious and historical events that likely prompted their production.^[4]

Chapter Five brings together five of Van Eyck’s paintings of the Virgin, beginning with the Rolin and Van der Paele Virgins, and the Dresden Virgin and Child with Saints and a Donor, Jan’s only surviving triptych. These extraordinary works, about which much has been written, again receive Acres’s astute, often quite poetic observations. The Louvre’s recent cleaning and restoration of the Rolin Virgin has recovered Van Eyck’s astonishing technique and handling in a beautifully preserved painting. This has brought new attention to all aspects of the work’s facture and meaning as presented in Sophie Caron’s recent Revoir Van Eyck exhibition (March 20—June 17, 2024) and catalogue. The second part of Chapter Five is devoted to two small jewels of Jan’s production: the Virgin in the Church and the Virgin at the Fountain. Both late works, these two paintings get somewhat short shrift from Acres, perhaps undeservingly so given their great popularity evidenced by many copies stretching into the sixteenth century. This begs the question of the fame of Jan’s two paintings, whether due to the perceived trickle-down effect of enhanced spiritual value derived from revered icons or whether from the celebrity of the artist, firmly established by the end of his life.

The sixth chapter, “Situating Saints,” brings together Van Eyck’s St. Barbara, St. Jerome in his Study, and the two versions of St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata. Recent scholarship on these three disparate paintings focuses on the unfinished nature of the St. Barbara and the questions of commissions of the other works related to Cardinal Albergati and to the famous Adornes family of Bruges. One gets the feeling that there is still more to discover about the impetus for the production of the two St. Francis paintings. Perhaps the recent focus of Jan Dumolyn and Noël Geirnaert on the Adornes family through their book A Celestial Jerusalem in Bruges and the associated exhibition currently on view in Bruges will reap rewards.

The final two chapters of Acres’s tome – “Portraiture and Presence” and “Another Mirror” – bring the book full circle by again considering Jan van Eyck within his art. As Acres points out, “Portraits were more integral to the art of Jan van Eyck than they had been to the work of any other European artist since antiquity” (p. 169). We thus begin to encounter and question the likely personal relationships that Van Eyck had with his sitters and the resulting attention he lavished on the verisimilitude of their presentation and presence as a result. Acres brings in the Arnolfini Portrait here, although as discussed above, the jury is still out on exactly who the man and woman are. In this context, Acres focuses in the final chapter, an epilogue, on the enigmatic Woman Bathing, recognizing the uniquely personal nature of the genre theme and exploring the possibility that it could be a portrait of Jan’s wife Margaret. This and other questions concerning Jan van Eyck’s portraiture will be raised in Emma Capron’s upcoming 2026 exhibition at the National Gallery in London.

Acres’s thoroughly enjoyable and readable account of Jan van Eyck and his art is the perfect introduction to this artist for students and aficionados alike. As is the case with all good books, it raises many questions and urges the reader to seek out answers in the still forthcoming scholarly literature on Van Eyck’s production.

Maryan Ainsworth
Curator Emerita, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York  

[1] Little known and not cited here is the most authoritative transcription and discussion of the dialect of the descriptive text found in the drawing that has implications for Van Eyck’s origins: A. Ampe and J. Goossens, “Taal en Herkomst van Jan van Eyck,” Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen 29 (1970): 82-90.
[2] Maryan W. Ainsworth, “Reconsidering the Relationship Between The Met Painting and the Rotterdam Crucifixion Drawing,” in Jan van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgment: Solving a Conundrum, ed. Maryan W. Ainsworth (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2022), 149-71. Reviewed in this Journal, February 2024.
[3] Barbara Baert, “The New Lamb and the Iconic Gaze,” in Revivals or Survivals? Resurgences of the Icon from the 15th Century to the Present Day, eds. Ralph Dekoninck and Ingrid Falque (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2023), 49-63.
[4] For this, the reader is directed to my own Jan van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgment: Solving a Conundrum (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2022) and to Till-Holger Borchert’s “Van Eyck, the Icons of the Holy Face and the Politics of Miracles,” in Revivals or Survivals? Resurgences of the Icon from the 15th Century to the Present Day, eds. Ralph Dekoninck and Ingrid Falque (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2023), 17-46.