Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?)

For another portrait of a man wearing a red chaperon painted by Van Eyck, see Portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini.

Artist	Jan van Eyck
Year	1433
Medium	Oil painting
Dimensions	25.5 cm × 19 cm (10.0 in × 7.5 in)
Location	National Gallery, London

Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) (or Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban) is an small oil painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck, completed in 1433 in Bruges. The inscription at the top of the frame, which is original, reads Als Ich Can (intended as the pun "as I/Eyck can", perhaps implying that "as only I, van Eyck, can) was a common autograph for van Eyck, but here is unusually large and prominent. This fact, along with the man's unusually direct and confrontational gaze, have been taken as an indication that the work is a self-portrait.

Probably his Portrait of Margaret van Eyck in Bruges was a pendant, although her only known portrait is both dated 1439 and larger. It has been proposed that van Eyck created the portrait to store in his workshop so that he could use it to display his abilities (and social status, given the fine clothes evident in the portrait) to potential clients. However, his reputation was such in 1433 that he was already highly sought after for commissioned work.

The panel has been in the National Gallery, London, since 1851, and is hung along-side his Arnolfini Portrait. The panel has been in England since its acquisition by Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, probably during his exile in Antwerp from 1642 to 1644.

Description

Detail of the sitter's right hand eye

The painting is a third life-size with the sitter sitting in three-quarters profile, and like all van Eyck's portraits, it provides a unsparing and detailed analysis of the subject. His stubbled face is heavily lined with the onset of middle age, and his eyes are semi-bloodshot. He looks outwards with a piercing gaze, directly at the viewer. His weary expression is achieved through a combination of his tightly pursed wide mouth and the framing of his face by the headdress. The overall expression is of a man, who one scholar says "see things – himself included – in close-up, but without losing track of the bigger picture."

Detail of the sitter's resigned mouth

Typically for van Eyck, the head is a little large in relation to the torso.

Detail of the inscription on the lower frame: "JOHES DE EYCK ME FECIT ANO MCCCC.33. 21. OCTOBRIS".

The original frame survives. The side mouldings were carved with the grain. Those at the top and bottom ends of the panel were carved separately and also with the grain. The vertical sides are in fact a single piece of wood with the central panel. It contains the painted inscription "JOHES DE EYCK ME FECIT ANO MCCCC.33. 21. OCTOBRIS" ("Jan van Eyck Made Me on October 21, 1433") at the bottom, and the motto "AlC IXH XAN" ("As Well As I Can") at the top. The latter wording is a pun on his name and appears on other van Eyck paintings, always written in Greek letters, however not ever so large and prominent. As on other van Eyck frames, the letters are painted to appear carved.

Headdress

Detail of the headdress

Depicting the lines and folds of the unusually large headdress in such an elaborate fashion allowed the artist to display his confidence in his abilities. According to the critic Teju Cole, "each wrinkle of the cloth, each fold, each soft glimmer of light across the soft weave, is painted with the holy precision Jan van Eyck helped introduce to art".

However the man is not, as it is commonly thought, wearing a turban, but a chaperon with the ends that normally hang down tied up over the top, which would be a sensible precaution if it was worn whilst painting. A similar chaperon is worn by a figure in the background of his 1435 Madonna of Chancellor Rolin and in the 1438 Portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini.

• 
  Detail from his Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (1435), showing a figure in the distance waiting a similar red headdress
• 
  Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, c. 1438. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Self Portrait?

The sitter is often thought to be van Eyck himself, though there is no documentary evidence for this. His direct gaze may be the result of the artist studying himself in a mirror, a throry further reinforced by the face that his hands, features that van Eyck typically emphasised, are not shown. The costume is appropriate for a man of van Eyck's social position, and the motto is his personal one, otherwise only appearing on two surviving religious paintings, two more known only from copies, and the portrait of his wife. In none of these is it as prominent as here, a primary reason, along with the very direct but bloodshot gaze, why the work is usually viewed as a self-portrait. The emphasis on the sitter's sharp and keenly intelligent bloodshot eyes is a further but subtle clue, one found again in Albrecht Dürer's 1500 Munich Self-Portrait. Some art historians view the work as a form of calling card for prospective clients, where van Eyck may be saying "look at what I can do with paint, how lifelike I can make my figures".

Autographing and dating paintings in the early 15th century was unusual. Even when dates were added they tended to the year of completion only, whereas here van Eyck spells out a specific date, October 21. As too few of his paintings survive (the confidently attributed and extant works number somewhere in the low 20s) to judge his prolificacy, the degree of detail and skill indicates that they took months rather than days to complete. Thus, the date may have served as a boast to potential commissioners rather than as a matter of fact.

Detail of the upper inscription: "AlC IXH XAN".

Since the motto Als Ich Can appears in many of van Eyck's other works, it is believed that he is in this self-portrait work, he challenging other artists to do better than him. Although written in Greek lettering here the phrase is originally Flemish; having a Flemish phrase in Greek script implies van Eyck saw himself in "competition with the ancients as well as with his contemporaries". Regardless of his reasoning, it can be assumed that the phrase is a sign of van Eyck's self-confidence about his work as a painter.

Pedant or diptych

Portrait of Margaret van Eyck, 1439. Groeningemuseum, Bruges

Some earlier collectors and art historians speculated that the panel might have once formed half of a pedant or diptych with the 1439 Portrait of Margaret van Eyck, his only female portrait which is also dominated by red hues (in this case a fur-lined red dress), and also contains an elaborate headdress. As with the current work, both were both completed in Bruges, but there is no record of their commissions. It is thus believed thats Margaret's panel was created to mark a personal occasion in their relationship, and was intended to hang as a pendant with one of van Eyck's self portraits.

However which self-portrait is unknown, given that a number of candidates are known from records but are now lost. A potential other candidate self-portrait is that mentioned in inventory records when two of his works were acquired before 1769 by the chapel of the Guild of Saint Luke. Some art historians, supporting the theory of a now lost diptych, mention a second lost potential self-portrait known to be similar in form to the NG painting.

See also

• List of works by Jan van Eyck

Sources

• Borchert, Till-Holger. Van Eyck. London: Taschen, 2008. ISBN 3-8228-5687-8
• Campbell, Lorne. The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings. London: National Gallery Catalogues (new series), 1998. ISBN 1-85709-171-X. OL 392219M. OCLC 40732051. LCCN 98-66510. (also titled The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Schools)
• De La Croix, Horst, et al. Gardner's Art Through the Ages. Harcourt, 1991.ISBN 0155037692
• Ferrari, Simone. Van Eyck: Masters of Art. Munich: Prestel, 2013. ISBN 978-3-7913-4826-1
• Hall, James. The Self-portrait: A Cultural History. London: Thames & Hudson, 2014. ISBN 978-0-5002-3910-0
• Harbison, Craig, Jan van Eyck, The Play of Realism, Reaktion Books, London, 1991. ISBN 0-948462-18-3
• Meiss. Millard. "'Nicholas Albergati' and the Chronology of Jan van Eyck's Portraits". The Burlington Magazine, volume 94, number 590, May 1952. pp. 137-146. JSTOR 870819
• Nash, Susie. Northern Renaissance art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 0-19-284269-2
• Janson, Horst W., and Penelope J. E. Davies. Janson's History of Art: the Western Tradition. London: Pearson Education, 2016. ISBN 0-13-387829-5
• Billinge, R. "Methods and materials of Northern European painting in the National Gallery, 1400-1550". National Gallery Technical Bulletin, volume 18, Early Northern European Painting, 1997, pp. 6–55. JSTOR 42616111
• Van Der Elst, Joseph. The Last Flowering of the Middle Ages. Kessinger Publishing, 2005. ISBN 1-4191-3806-5

External links

• Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) at National Gallery
• A guide to Jan van Eyck's confident self portrait, by Emma Capron, Associate Curator of Renaissance Painting at the National Gallery, via YouTube
• Jan van Eyck, Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban (Self-Portrait?), 1433, Smarthistory via YouTube