Nine portraits, the invention of presence, and who gets to be seen 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...

Art history loves a rivalry. Picasso and Matisse. Michelangelo and Raphael. The narrative flatters our appetite for drama and simplifies the messy business of influence into something resembling sport. Turner and Constable have long been conscripted into this tradition. The press of their day delighted in the opposition: fire and water, poetry and truth, the sublime and the pastoral. When Constable allegedly manoeuvred to give his painting greater prominence at the Royal Academy exhibition of...

Reviewed by Mariska Beekenkamp-Wladimiroff --- Vermeer remains, as Théophile Thoré-Bürger dubbed him in the nineteenth century, "The Sphinx of Delft": thirty-five or thirty-six surviving paintings, almost no documents, no letters, no drawings, and a biography that can be written on a single page. Every generation therefore gets the Vermeer it needs, and Andrew Graham-Dixon's contribution to this long tradition of reinvention is, whatever else may be said of it, formidable in scale and...