Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/851

Rh E Y C K 815 hand, the Worship of the Lamb, commissioned by Jodocus Vijdts, lord of Pamele, is the noblest creation of the Flemish school, a piece of which we possess all the parts dispersed from St Bavon in Ghent to the galleries of Brussels and Berlin, one upon which Hubert laboured till he died, leaving it to be completed by his brother. Almost unique as an illustration of contemporary feeling for Chris tian art, this great composition can only be matched by the Fount of Salvation, in the museum of Madrid. It repre sents, on numerous panels, Christ on the judgment seat, with the Virgin and St John the Baptist at His sides, hearing the songs of angels, and contemplated by Adam and Eve, and, beneath him, the Lamb shedding His blood in the presence of angels, apostles, prophets, martyrs, knights, and hermits. On the outer sides of the panels are the Virgin and the angel annunciate, the sibyls and prophets who foretold the coming of the Lord, and the donors in prayer at the feet of the Baptist and Evangelist. After this great work was finished it was placed, in 1432, on an altar in St Bavon of Ghent, with an inscription on the framework describing Hubert as &quot; maior quo nemo reper- tus,&quot; and setting forth, in colours as imperishable as the picture itself, that Hubert began and John afterwards brought it to perfection. John Van Eyck certainly wished to guard against an error which ill-informed posterity showed itself but too prone to foster, the error that he alone had composed and carried out an altarpiece executed jointly by Hubert and himself. His contemporaries may be credited with full knowledge of the truth in this respect, and the facts were equally well known to the duke of Burgundy or the chiefs of the corporation of Bruges, who visited the painter s house in state in 1432, and the members of the chamber of rhetoric at Ghent, who reproduced the Agnus Dei as a tableau vivant in 1456. Yet a later generation of Flemings forgot the claims of Hubert, and gave the honours that were his due to his brother John exclusively. The solemn grandeur of church art in the loth century never found, out of Italy, a nobler exponent than Hubert Van Eyck. His representation of Christ as the judge, between the Virgin and St John, affords a fine display of realistic truth, combined with pure drawing and gorgeous colour, and a happy union of earnestness and simplicity with the deepest religious feeling. In contrast with earlier productions of the Flemish school, it shows a singular depth of tone and great richness of detail. Finished with sur prising skill, it is executed with the new oil medium, of which Hubert shared the invention with his brother, but of which no rival artists at the time possessed the secret, a medium which consists of subtle mixtures of oil and varnish applied to the moistening of pigments after a fashion, only kept secret for a time from guilclsmen of neighbouring cities, but unrevealed to the Italians till near the close of ths 15th century. When Hubert died on the 18th September 1426, he was buried in the chapel on the altar of which his masterpiece was placed. According to a tradition as old as the 16th century, his arm was preserved as a relic in a casket above the portal of St Bavon of Ghent. During a life of much apparent activity and surprising successes, he taught the elements of his art to his brother John, who survived him. 2. JOHN VAN EYCK. The date of his birth is not more accurately known than that of his elder brother, but he was born much later than Hubert, who took charge of him and made him his &quot;disciple.&quot; Under this tuition John learnt to draw and paint, and mastered the properties of colours from Pliny. Later on, Hubert admitted him into partnership, and both were made court painters to Philip of Charolais. After the breaking up of the prince s house hold in 1421, John became his own master, left the workshop of Hubert, and took an engagement as painter to John of Bavaria, at that time resident at the Hague as count of Holland. From the Hague he returned in 1424 to take service with Philip, now duke of Burgundy, at a salary of 100 livres per annum, arid from that time till his death John Van Eyck remained the faithful servant of his prince, who never treated him otherwise than graciously. He was frequently employed in missions of trust ; and following the fortunes of a chief who was always in the saddle, he appears for a time to have been in ceaseless motion, receiving extra pay for secret services at Leyden, drawing his salary at Bruges, yet settled in a fixed abode at Lille. In 1428 he joined the embassy sent by Philip the Good to Lisbon to beg the hand of Isabella of Portugal. His portrait of the bride fixed the duke s choice. After his return he settled finally at Bruges, where he married, and his wife bore him a daughter, known in after years as a nun in the convent of Maeseyck. At the christening of this child the duke was sponsor, and this was but one of many distinctions by which Philip the Good rewarded his painter s merits. Numerous altarpieces and portraits now give proof of Van Eyck s extensive practice. As finished works of art and models of conscientious labour they are all worthy of the name they bear, though not of equal excellence, none being better than those which were com pleted about 1432. Of an earlier period, a Consecration of Thomas a Becket has been preserved, and may now be seen at Chatsworth, bearing the date of 1421 ; no doubt this picture would give a fair representation of Van Eyck s talents at the moment when he started as an independent master, but that time and accidents of omission and com mission have altered its state to such an extent that no con clusive opinion can be formed respecting it. The panels of the Worship of the Lamb were completed nine years later. They show that John Van Eyck was quite able to work in the spirit of his brother. He had not only the lines of Hubert s compositions to guide him, he had also those parts to look at and to study which Hubert had finished. He continued the work with almost as much vigour as his master. His own experience had been increased by travel, and he had seen the finest varieties of landscape in Portugal and the Spanish provinces. This enabled him to transfer to his pictures the charming scenery of lands more sunny than those of Flanders, and this he did with accuracy and not without poetic feeling. We may ascribe much of the success which attended his efforts to complete the altarpiece of Ghent to the cleverness with which he repro duced the varied aspect of changing scenery, reminiscent here of the orange groves of Cintra, there of the bluffs and crags of his native valley. In all these backgrounds, though we miss the scientific rules of perspective with which the Van Eycks were not familiar, we find such delicate perceptions of gradations in tone, such atmosphere, yet such minuteness and perfection of finish, that our admiration never flags. Nor is the colour less brilliant or the touch less firm than in Hubert s panels. John only differs from his brother in being less masculine and less sternly religious. He excels in two splendid likenesses of Jodocus A T ijdts and his wife Catherine Burluuts. The same vigorous style and coloured key of harmony charac terizes the small Virgin and Child of 1432 at Ince, and the Madonna, probably of the same date, at the Louvre, executed for Rollin, chancellor of Burgundy. Contemporary with these, the male portraits in the National Gallery, and the Man with the Pinks, in the Berlin Museum (1432-4), show no relaxation of power ; but later creations display no further progress, unless we accept as progress a more search ing delicacy of finish, counterbalanced by an excessive soft ness of rounding in flesh contours. An unfaltering minute ness of hand and great tenderness of treatment may be