Jan van Eyck valuation
The Arnolfini Portrait and the Ghent Altarpiece, by the painter who showed what oil paint could do.
Jan van Eyck (about 1390–1441) worked in The Hague for the Count of Holland and from 1425 for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, who also sent him on diplomatic missions; from about 1430 he lived in Bruges.
What a work by Jan van Eyck is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Jan van Eyck (about 1390–1441) worked in The Hague for the Count of Holland and from 1425 for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, who also sent him on diplomatic missions; from about 1430 he lived in Bruges. With his brother Hubert he painted the Ghent Altarpiece, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, finished in 1432 and still in St Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent, and three of his portraits, among them the Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 and the Portrait of a Man of 1433, perhaps a self-portrait, are in the National Gallery in London. He did not invent oil painting, but his layered glazes gave light, texture and detail a reality no painter had achieved before. Only about twenty paintings by him survive, several of them signed and dated, which was unusual at the time.
Paintings by Van Eyck are almost all in museums and churches and practically never change hands. What does come to market is the work of the Early Netherlandish painters who followed him, in Bruges and elsewhere, and of the workshops that repeated his compositions long after his lifetime. With these panels the questions are attribution, date and condition: tree-ring dating of the oak, infrared images of the drawing under the paint and analysis of the paint layers can place a picture in time and in a workshop, and the extent of later restoration matters as much as the name.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
