The National Gallery is bringing together for the first time nine portraits by Jan van Eyck, on loan from London, Berlin, Vienna, and Bruges. Half of all that survives of the Flemish master, in a single room.

They had never been seen together before. The National Gallery has assembled them. They are small panels, often narrower than a sheet of paper, and you have to get close to understand what is happening within them. A hair of beard. A vein on a temple. The reflection of a mullioned window in a three-millimeter pupil. No one before him had looked at a human being so closely. At the heart of the exhibition, the Arnolfini Portrait encounters a panel from Berlin depicting the same Giovanni, aged. The Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban, believed to be a self-portrait and recently restored, faces that of Margaret van Eyck, the painter's wife, painted at thirty-three with her wrinkles and double chin. Court painter to Philip the Good, Van Eyck worked for Flemish merchants who knew exactly what they were paying, and he made no secret of it: his motto, Als ich can, as much as I can, runs across several frames. The exhibition deciphers these inscriptions, these signatures, these dates, delivered like challenges, and details a glazing technique so patient that the painting takes on the brilliance of stained glass. The loans come from the greatest museums in Europe. In Flanders at the height of its wealth, cloth merchants and bankers deemed their own features worthy of being fixed for eternity, on par with princes and saints.

See also: our exhibitions in the United Kingdom and the entire Europe section.

NATIONAL GALLERY
London - United Kingdom
From 21 November 2026 to 11 April 2027