Jan van Eyck: The Portraits; To Life, Not From Life
Fri, Oct 30
|Richmond Library Annexe, online & replay
This talk will be an introductory discussion of the upcoming National Gallery blockbuster under the same name. The function and meaning of a portrait and how Jan van Eyck completely shifts the interpretation of this is the point of reference. More info below
Time & Location
Oct 30, 2026, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Richmond Library Annexe, online & replay, Quadrant Rd, Richmond TW9 1DH, UK
About the Event
This November, the National Gallery in London will attempt something that has never been done before and, by the institution’s own assessment, will never be done again: it will gather in a single building all nine surviving independent portraits by Jan van Eyck. The paintings are scattered across five museums in four countries — London, Vienna, Berlin, Bruges, Sibiu — and several have not travelled in decades. The Arnolfini Portrait has left the National Gallery only once in over a century. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has agreed to lend both its Van Eycks simultaneously for the first time in its history. That such an assembly requires the word “only” to describe nine objects tells us something about the scale of loss that six centuries have inflicted on the work of a single painter — and something about the preciousness of what remains.
The modern visitor, arriving at Trafalgar Square…
Tickets
RSVP
£16.00
+£0.40 ticket service fee
Creditor
This ticket is only for people who have credit with Art Historical London because they have paid in advance or because they have a gift voucher.
£0.00
Total
£0.00