by usia review

Van Eyck: The Face of the Individual Before Modernity

Bringing together all the portraits attributed to Jan van Eyck in a single space is a curatorial gesture of rare ambition. Van Eyck: The Portraits at the National Gallery proposes more than a historical exhibition: it advances something close to a thesis. By concentrating on the Flemish painter’s portrait production, it argues that it is here, within this small yet exceptional body of fifteenth-century works, that the modern idea of portraiture as an affirmation of the individual truly begins.

Before these figures—among them the celebrated couple immortalised in the Arnolfini Portrait—we do not encounter fixed social types, but unsettling presences. Van Eyck does not merely paint likenesses; he constructs consciousness. His sitters sustain the viewer’s gaze with an intensity that traverses centuries. The renowned technical precision—the moist gleam of the eyes, the meticulous rendering of textiles, the microscopic reflections of light on polished surfaces—is less an exercise in virtuosity than a means of achieving psychological density. Oil paint here is not simply a medium; it becomes a language of radical observation.

There is something strikingly contemporary about these paintings. The frontal poses, the tight framing, the neutral or dark backgrounds that isolate the figure and concentrate attention on the face anticipate visual strategies we now associate with photography and even digital portraiture. By removing the individual from the noise of the world and placing them at the compositional centre, Van Eyck participates in a decisive moment in European culture: the emergence of the subject as an entity worthy of singular representation. In this respect, the exhibition convincingly fulfils its premise.

Yet the curatorial narrative tends toward an almost hagiographic reading of the artist. The emphasis on the isolated, revolutionary, technically unrivalled genius leaves less room to contextualise the political, economic, and social dynamics that made this production possible. The Burgundian court—above all the patronage of Philip the Good—the complex systems of diplomacy and commerce, and the symbolic dimension of portraiture as an instrument of power appear only discreetly, when they might have deepened our understanding of these images as social constructions as calculated as they are subtle.

Portraits in the fifteenth century were not neutral mirrors; they were assertions of status, piety, lineage, and legitimacy. To be represented with such scrutiny was itself a political privilege. The stillness of these faces, their composure and contained authority, speak not only of interiority but of position within a carefully structured world. A more expansive curatorial frame might have illuminated how Van Eyck’s radical naturalism operated within—and reinforced—the hierarchies of his time.

The installation’s atmosphere—quiet, restrained, almost reverential—reinforces this sense of devotion to the master. The lighting isolates each face in a near-sacral hush, inviting admiration more readily than critical questioning. One moves from panel to panel as though through a chapel of secular saints.

Even so, it is difficult to leave unaffected. Seeing these portraits gathered together intensifies the sense of a turning point in the history of Western art. The Arnolfini Portrait remains enigmatic; the gazes continue to confront us; the feeling of presence endures with undiminished force. If at times the exhibition edges too closely toward institutional celebration, the intrinsic power of the works surpasses any excess of reverence.

What lingers, in the end, is not merely confirmation of Van Eyck’s technical genius. It is the awareness that, in that moment of the fifteenth century, something shifted irreversibly: the human face became a site of identity, introspection, and power. The individual—once absorbed into type, symbol, or theology—emerged as a subject of singular attention.

That discovery continues to shape how we see ourselves—and how we are seen—today.

Van Eyck: The Portraits, 21 November 2026 – 11 April 2027

A National Gallery Production