REFLECTIONS: VAN EYCK AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

National Gallery, London, to 2nd April 2018

Whether you enjoy this exhibition or not will depend on your feelings about the Pre-raphaelites.

Extraordinarily, the youthful movement which shocked the art establishment in 1848, before virtually becoming the establishment, still provokes some modernist art critics to mouth-frothing fury, while, to other people, it represents the height of beauty.

The exhibition sets out to demonstrate that Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Portrait’, which had been bought by the nascent National Gallery in 1842, was an essential ingredient in the group’s choice of ‘Pre-raphaelite’ as their battle-cry. Millais, Hunt and Rossetti were students in the RA Schools next door, and Holman Hunt, at least, saw it.

Except as prints, they would have had few other original pre-raphael works to study. Indeed, they possibly knew little of Raphael himself; although, at the recent Ashmolean show of his drawings, I wondered whether one or two might not have directly inspired the young Millais.

Undoubtedly Van Eyck’s detailed, painstaking technique chimed with the young rebels against romantic vagueness. Before it came to Britain as loot from Napoleon’s brother Joseph, who had looted it from the Spanish Bourbons, it had influenced Velázquez.

The show makes great play with the famous convex mirror, which gives unprecedented depth to the composition. This was taken up by Velázquez in ‘Las Meninas’ and again by the Pre-raphaelites.

If you do like them, then go. It is a wonderful opportunity to look closely at Van Eyck’s great work, and at some fine Pre-raphaelites from the Tate. Make up your own minds as to the influence.