Van Eyck mirrors don’t give us a true reflection
Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-raphaelites National Gallery
There is no doubt that Reflections, at the National Gallery, is beautifully designed. But its argument, about the impact of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait upon 19th century British art, proves tenuous in the extreme.
Five years after Van Eyck’s masterpiece was first displayed at the National Gallery, in 1843, three students at the Royal Academy Schools, then situated in the east wing of the building, founded the Pre-raphaelite Brotherhood.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais turned for inspiration to painters from earlier centuries, preceding the era of Raphael – including Van Eyck.
Van Eyck could replicate reality with preternatural skill and the young Pre-raphaelites, thrilled by the Arnolfini Portrait, set about imitating his meticulous approach.
Towards the end of his life, Edward Burne-jones, another artist associated with the PRB, recalled standing before Van Eyck’s picture, and resolving “to do something as deep and rich in colour and as beautifully finished”.
William Morris, meanwhile, adopted as his personal motto the words Als Ich Kan (As I can), which Van Eyck had inscribed on the frame of his peerless Portrait of a Man (1433).
The trouble is, aside from Burnejones’s remark, and Morris’s motto, there is scant documentary evidence that the Pre-raphaelites considered Van Eyck their creative hero.
The curators ignore fundamental differences in the pictures. Van Eyck balanced complex, fiddly passages, such as the elaborate green sleeve of the woman’s dress in the Arnolfini Portrait, with areas of calm, such as the plain floorboards. The Preraphaelites, by contrast, crammed their pictures with clashing surfaces and textures, to the point of surfeit.
After an introductory section, in which the Arnolfini Portrait is juxtaposed, to modest success, with Millais’s Mariana (1851), the exhibition veers off, erratically, down an extended digression about mirrors. This is justified by the circular convex mirror that is a prominent feature of Van Eyck’s painting.
Admittedly, Hunt’s grand portrait, Il Dolce far Niente (1859-66), contains a similar mirror. Yet it shares little, in terms of spirit, with Van Eyck’s work.
Credulity already strained, this overly essayistic show concludes with an odd section about the influence on British painting of Velazquez’s Las Meninas – the link being that the Prado’s renowned canvas (represented here by John Phillip’s partial copy of 1862) also boasts a mirror. By this point, the thread of the argument, like our patience, is close to snapping.