Corot's Women - from the everyday to magic

Agostina

What could be more hackneyed and traditional? A traditional nineteenth-century painter has composed a roomful of figure paintings, almost all of women, posed by everyday models wearing traditional rustic dress and holding a trite object such as a guitar or paint brush. And yet the exhibition (at the Washington National Gallery of Art) was pure magic. Corot seems to have captured something fundamental in these works. This is not achieved by heavy-handed symbolism, like much 19th-century narrative art; the least successful of these works are often the pictures trying to convey the most. A Saint Sebastian fails because he is not just a figure in a landscape; we are trying to read more into it. Sebastian’s face is almost completely hidden, and certainly, the faces appear to be a key to the mystery.

Woman with a pearl

Corot’s Woman with a Pearl, around 1860, is one of his finest portraits. The clothes are traditional; the pose completely relaxed, not challenging the painter; this is not a virtuoso piece. And yet the handling is exquisite, and what is conveyed is a sense of something deep and elemental. As with Matisse, Corot had the gift of transforming an everyday human figure, with banal clothes and postures, into something that seems to strike a deep chord within us. That something is certainly female; it is the dress, a traditional costume, that seems to communicate something eternal rather than transient. Any real human is of the moment – their language, their habits, their appearance – but in a painting by Corot, the transient seems to communicate something deeper. We know perfectly well that it is a trick, that a photograph of the same situation would be truly banal, but we willingly participate in the artist’s transformation of the model into something deeper and more significant.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Corot’s landscapes have a similar quality of capturing something significant from a trivial view. I can look at hundreds of 19th-century landscapes with indifference, but a Corot landscape is almost always recognisable from across a gallery; perhaps partly because Corot is satisfied with a very un-picturesque, ordinary of the view, but partly for the exquisite brushstrokes that make up the overall effect of the painting, a technique full of movement. When viewed closely, the brush strokes are loose and seemingly casual. This is the opposite of (say) Van Eyck’s detail and precision; it is wonderfully alive.

As soon as you make a claim for Corot’s figures, you can find successful examples that do not conform with that claim. Thus, for example, you could claim that Agostina (1866), one of the best figure paintings, has something of Picasso about it. The model has an elemental heaviness, with an exaggerated roundness of the hips. You feel from the painting that this figure has not moved for thousands of years. It is not conventionally beautiful: the shoulders are unusually slanted rather than horizontal. The head seems almost reduced to a cylinder above the body. The result is a sense of stillness about the figure as if it were archetypal, as if this figure could have been standing there in ancient Greece.

Springtime of Life

Other paintings, such as the portentously titled Springtime of Life (1871), while still figure studies, have nothing corporeal about them. They place the figure firmly within, and equally important with, the landscape. The face is almost hidden, and the body takes up less than half the height of the frame. This is not a figure study; this is a draped figure in a landscape. Nonetheless, the impression is very powerful. Leaves on nearby shrubs and plants around the figure are painted with simple flicks of paint, expressing a kind of endless movement, so that the stasis of the woman is contrasted to the motion all around, a kind of state of perpetual flux. It is almost as if the landscape around is responding to the draperies of the dress, a celebration of femaleness that transforms the model.

 

Lady in Blue

Strangely, the nudes by Corot are not the most successful works in this show. Perhaps it is in the depiction of clothes and landscape where Corot excels, rather than the body alone. One of the best examples is the late Lady in Blue (1874), which has a woman in profile, leaning against some furniture, and wearing a grand blue dress that is the centre of attention. You are reminded of the traditional photographers who offered to create tableaux for their clients, so that you could dress up so that for a fleeting moment and become something exotic.  This is a painting about the magic of painting, its ability to transcend the dull reality it is situated in.

The blue dress appears to have lifted the figure out of the anonymous and drab background, and transformed the figure into something significant. It is a kind of magic indeed.

Can Hollywood do hip?

Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire

At first sight, two Hollywood films I watched recently had little in common. Ball of Fire (1941) is a Hollywood screwball comedy about a team of rather elderly encyclopedia editors getting mixed up with gangsters. Booksmart (2019), made all of 88 years later, is a coming-of-age movie about teens graduating from high school and partying on their last night before going on university.

You could not imagine two less similar films. Yet there are interesting similarities. Both films contrast studying versus being hip, almost as if the American dream could not envisage life without popular music and wisecracks. In Ball of Fire, the seven encyclopedia editors, with an average age of around 65, apart from the very noticeably younger Gary Cooper, as Professor Bertram Potts, are struggling to complete their vast encyclopedia, over time and over budget. They are stuck at the letter “S”, and specifically, Gary Cooper is unhappy with the entry for slang. To improve the article, and get more real-world awareness of slang, he ventures into metropolitan New York, and meets Barbara Stanwyck, a singer (and more importantly, a frequent user of slang) mixed up with gangsters. Unfortunately, the slang is rather prim, and not helped by being laboriously and frequently explained for the benefit of the (presumably) less hip cinemagoers. Slang might be hip, but constant translations are not. I longed for the light touch (and enjoyable slang) of Damon Runyon.

In Booksmart, two teenage girls discover on the very last day of their schooling that although they have sacrificed their social life to get into to a prestigious university, that many of their peers have achieved the same result as well as partying hard. So they decide to make up for all the lost months and years of study with one night of dedicated socialising.

So you can see the connection. Here are two films that propose a very similar thesis: in Hollywood-world, you can study all you like, but it counts for nothing if you aren’t hip. Hip can be any or all of clubbing, drinking, cool music; it is above all social, and noisy Here is a message for the masses: yes, there are people who study like mad, but we, the viewers, represent the majority, and social life is our milieu.

For such a premise to work, the presentation of “hip” is all-important. You could describe the vast majority of Hollywood films as an attempt to depict hip, so directors and actors have had plenty of opportunity to get it right. But on the subject of hip, Ball of Fire fails miserably. Barbara Stanwyck, as Sugarpuss O’Shea, has to provide pretty much all the hip elements, and for all Howard Hawk’s many skills, his idea of hip leaves much to be desired. Stanwyck is no night-club singer, and her solo performance, and her outfits, are both underwhelming (and not helped by a very curious and misguided attempt to have one verse of her song accompanied by nothing but the sound of striking matches on a matchbox). Subsequently, she attempts to display eroticism when she arrives late at night at the shared home of all the encyclopedists, but her attempt at suggestive undressing is vastly inferior to Stanwyck’s own performance in The Lady Eve (also 1941). Perhaps trying to appear erotic in front of seven males is well-nigh impossible: it’s burlesque rather than suggestive. The film ends with Cooper marrying Stanwyck, leaving the problem of the six other bridesmaids, who aren’t going to disappear any time soon. Doesn’t look like a recipe for paradise.

Booksmart also has its problems. In this high-school film, “hip” is restricted to eighteen and under with no experience of life apart from institutions which is not very hip. The parties depicted seem to be mainly about the display of wealth: rented yachts, vast houses with unlimited drink and lavish, tasteless bourgeois interiors. More challenging, and undermining the serious study versus hip theme, the two protagonists, Molly and Amy, have a relationship that is anything but comic. Their union appears to be a defensive alliance, with the main aim of reducing or removing the need to interact with their peers. They know little about each other: Molly is unaware of Amy’s intention to spend a gap year in Africa. Worse, Molly clearly bullies Amy. They have a code word, malala, which when triggered by either demands immediate and absolute acceptance of any action from the other. When Molly says the magic word, Amy complies, but when Amy asks for the same favour, it is rejected. Matters come to a head in a blazing row in the middle of a party, observed by all the other partygoers.

By the end of both films, we have come to realise two things. Hollywood for the most part isn’t very good at depicting hip, and neither film manages to end on a comic high. Based on these films, I would prefer either compiling encyclopedias or reading in a library to any of the depictions of hip on offer.

The Penguin Book of Irish Comic Writing: too Irish, not comic enough

It looked so tempting in the bookshop. Why worry about finding a novel that might or might not turn out to be entertaining, when here is one with “comic” on the cover. It looked guaranteed to be entertaining when read aloud at the dinner table.

The reality was somewhat different. By one simple critera alone, the book failed: does this story make me laugh? Of the 43 stories included, fewer than ten made me laugh out loud. So what were the other stories about? How had they been selected?

Unfortunately, it seems that the compiler of the anthology, Ferdia Mac Anna, had chosen the stories on the basis of his own taste. He was born in 1955, which means that the sixties were too soon for him. Like many males of his generation, he seems to have responded to the idea of ‘liberation’ with the response that it was now OK to give full rein to his very male, very 1970s ideas of freedom: getting sloshed in the pub, doling out some misogynist and sexist remarks to any nearby females, and enjoying swearing for no particular purpose.

So, for example, there is one story, by Joseph O’Connor, about a young Irishman who travels to London to seek work. His sister arranges for him to meet a successful Irish businessman, who finds the young man some work. Instead of being grateful, the narrator, Dave, steals from the wallet of someone at his work, then throws away the businessman’s car keys and empties his briefcase on the pavement. Acts of gratuitous malevolence, pure resentment at someone else’s success. However tasteless the businessman might be does not justify such unacceptable behaviour. The worst is that we are expected to find this funny.

Or there is another story about a conceptual artist who progressively sells off his body parts. The story could be funny, but here had no humour whatever. Or the story featuring a young boy who tells everyone he meets to fuck off. We are expected to find this funny as well.  Michael Curtin’s story was one of the most offensive, a bell-ringer who tries (and fails) to seduce a woman in a pub. Even when someone spilled beer all over him, I failed to laugh.

Perhaps I sound like a curmudgeon, but for me the stories too often presented an Ireland that seems to be rapidly disappearing, a world of smoking, drinking, and cursing among men. Some of the stories were simply not funny, and some of the others attempted to be funny without achieving it – notably Flann O’Brien, whose humour was in this extract laboured.

One or two of the stories stood out. Frank O’Connor, as usual, was hilarious in his description of a young boy’s first confession. It is dated 1953, at which time it was, I think, still possible to have a humorous story set around confession at the local parish church. When the young boy confesses evil thoughts towards his bullying sister, the priest astonishes him by saying she will get her comeuppance sooner or later. Maeve Binchy tells a story, set in London, about liberal attitudes (for its time) to homosexuality, with comic consequences: the narrator is assumed erroneously to be gay and is hence invited back to a social group as a demonstration of their liberal inclusivity. Mary Morrissy writes a tale about a social misfit who steals books.

But for the most part, this is a rather dated collection representing a view of Ireland, and a view of humanity, that I would largely hope to have died out today. The book cover seems to sum it up: a curmudgeonly-looking old man in a cloth cap sitting in a pub, smoking. His dog is looking up at him, as if to say “Time you were moving on from here. We moved on from Joyce years ago”.

Ruskin and wealth

Ruskin, Study of Oak leaves, 1879

Stuart Eagles’ book After Ruskin (2011) is on a vital topic: Ruskin was one of the great Victorian prophets, and his influence on subsequent British life was vast. A famous poll of Labour MPs in the 1920s, by W T Stead, asked them to list the book that had influenced them most as a Labour politician. There were more votes for Ruskin than for the Bible, or for any other writer; and the most mentioned book was Unto This Last.

If that isn’t influence, I don’t know what is; and yet Stuart Eagles’ book has in my view a very skewed view of that influence, which is reflected in the chapter arrangement. Just one of the book’s six chapters is concerned with Ruskin’s influence on politics. The remaining chapters are devoted to initiatives that certainly came after Ruskin, but which in terms of influence had perhaps less influence overall, when put together, than Ruskin on the British Labour Party. Few people today would even know there is a Ruskin Society, or a Guild of St George. Almost nobody outside Ruskin scholars has heard of John Howard Whitehouse, who Eagles claims is the pre-eminent 20th-century Ruskinian. If that were the case, it wouldn’t say much for Ruskin’s influence.

Ruskin’s writing seems to exert a strange hypnotic influence on the people who study him. Tim Hilton wrote a two-volume Life of Ruskin. Book One was 279 pages, while Book Two appeared 15 years later and had no fewer than 596 pages. Hilton seems to have become progressively more immersed in Ruskin during his mammoth project. By the end of the biography, Hilton states “I do not believe that Ruskin wrote too much … and I occasionally lament, as he did himself, the absence of books he projected but never issued.” [from the Foreword to Book Two]. Eagles, by the end of his book After Ruskin, has taken to calling Ruskin “The Master” in the text (many of the sources he quotes from use the same title). Moreover, Eagles drifts into idolatry in attempting to make sense of Ruskin’s text. His view seems to be that, in the absence of any other evidence, we should assume that whatever actions Ruskin did were the correct ones.

For example, take the celebrated phrase “There is no wealth but life”. It occurs at the end of Unto This Last:

THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

It sounds impressive, but on closer examination the meaning starts to dissolve. “Life” includes love, joy and admiration. Why admiration? A rich country has happy human beings; OK, so the “wealth” of life is happiness. But then the argument progresses from happiness to being influential. The third and last sentence seems to define Ruskin’s own life rather than simply to define happiness. The best person is someone who is influential. And not just influential, but influential by his or her possessions. Why? Can’t I just be happy as a workman? It is a very special kind of happiness to influence by your possessions, but Ruskin giving away his prized Turner watercolours to the University museums fits that description very well. For the rest of us, who don’t own any Turners, perhaps our wealth (and happiness) will of necessity be of a lower order.

Mr Eagles repeats the “no wealth but life” phrase several times during his book. Unfortunately, his gloss of the meaning is circular and removes what little meaning the phrase had originally:

Ruskin’s was a human language that celebrated, above all, life itself. He did not merely argue the case that “There is no Wealth but Life”, his words and style of writing were themselves the very language of life. [p208]

It is as if Ruskin’s words exerted a hypnotic effect on the writer. The closing lines of Eagles’ book are: 

Ruskin’s life was wealth as he himself defined it. He was among the richest in England because, having perfected the function of his own life to the utmost, he had always the widest helpful influence, both personal and, by means of his possessions, over the lives of others. [p272]

Quite what it means to perfect the function of one’s own life I do not know. I certainly don’t think Ruskin would make any such claim for his own life.

In the context of this rather vague definition of wealth, Ruskin addresses the workers, in one of the most celebrated passages in Fors Clavigera, on the subject of wealth:

The wealth of the world is yours … Whose fault is it, you clothmakers, that any English child is in rags? Whose fault is it, you shoemakers, that the street harlots mince in high-heeled shoes, while your own babes paddle barefoot in the street slime? … Primarily, of course, it is your clergymen’s and masters’ fault; but also in this your own, that you never educate any of your children with the earnest object of enabling them to see their way out of this, not by rising above their father’s business, but by setting in order what was amiss in it. [Fors Clavigera, Letter 89, September 1880]

Workers are to find wealth, in other words, not by rising above their station, or by earning more money, but by “setting in order what was amiss” with their father’s occupation. There is no denying the venom behind the words; it is a masterpiece of oratory. But perhaps here is the ultimate challenge posed by Ruskin. If we don’t have a vast private income and the world’s best collection of Turner, then how exactly should we set in order what is amiss? Dig the roads of Hinksey? Found a Ruskinian boarding school, as John Howard Whitehouse did, and amass the world’s biggest collection of Ruskiniana? Perhaps one answer lies in the simple yet astonishing Ruskin watercolour shown above. That is a kind of wealth, although not measured, or even considered, in Unto This Last.   

What happened after Ruskin?

Ruskin (centre), with W B Scott (left) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (right)

“One of the most remarkable men … of all times.” So said Tolstoy, and who are we to disagree? But what exactly became of all that writing, speaking, and thinking, collected in 39 volumes of the Collected Works of Ruskin? What tangible evidence of Ruskin survived his death?

Anyone who has participated in a meeting of the Guild of St George, the charity founded by Ruskin, and still going strong, will be fascinated by the book After Ruskin, by Stuart Eagles (2011). The Guild, after all, was founded by Ruskin himself to execute his ideas. So what did happen to Ruskin’s initiatives such as the Guild? Why did the Guild own cottages in Barmouth, Wales, and still owns a farm in Bewdley, Worcestershire? Eagles is surely correct to state that “the significance of Ruskin’s legacy lies in his inspiration call for social action.” [p1], but the initiatives described here are pretty minor.

Eagles’ book is a pleasant enough tour of some Ruskinian initiatives between 1870 and 1920. It is informative and readable, if not getting to the bottom of why all the people were passionate about Ruskin. What is covered is interesting, although Eagles, rightly or wrongly, leaves out the best-known examples of Ruskin’s influence, such as William Morris (because, curiously, “Morris’s significance in the story of Ruskin’s influence is now well established”) and ends at a rather abitrary date. However, this enables Eagles concentrate on some smaller initiatives, such as the Ruskin Linen Industry in the Lake District, the Woodhouse Mills of Huddersfield, and, the Guild of St George itself.  

The book could be a lot more exciting, perhaps because Eagles’ text is full of dutiful statements that do little to advance the argument. I can read paragraphs of Mr Eagles without being able to deny anything he says, but without learning anything new either. For example: “Ruskin cannot be uprooted from his historical context but not, equally, can the responses of his readers be disentangled either from theirs, or from their perception of his.” [p18]. Nor does it help to read the Tolstoy quote above, since no justification is given for this grand statement. The contrast between Ruskin’s attempt to bring together vast opposites, to marry morals with economics, social values with art history, and even drawing with politics; and the small-scale, often insignificant initiatives carried out in his name is shown very starkly – but not perhaps as the author of this book intended. Look at the photograph of Ruskin above; it would be difficult to visualise anyone more full of energy and passion. Those words of his could move continents, yet compare that to the Ruskin Linen Industry, which at its peak employed around twelve women - and that was one of the more successful initiatives done in the name of Ruskin. 

But to give Eagles credit, he also identifies one reason why people found it difficult to follow Ruskin. He quotes Jose Harris: “R’s social writings were less a blueprint for action than simple a form of personal inspiration … [that] did not necessarily give detailed instruction on how things should be done” [p10]. And despite Ruskin’s mighty prose, it doesn’t boil down to a very precise call to action. He might have said “There is no wealth but life”, but it’s not straightforward to turn that statement into practical action.  

Ruskin himself was fully aware of this difficulty and did his best to make it worse. “I do not and cannot set myself up for a political leader … I entirely decline any manner of political action which shall hinder me from drawing leaves and flowers.” [Fors Clavigera, 1877]. Elsewhere, he was a little more direct: “If you were a companion of St George I would say to you, Have you enough to live on in your present degree of comfort in life? If so – do not add to it. Spend whatever is naturally and easily added to it in charity.” [p76]

Today, much of Ruskin’s thinking is rather uncomfortable. Providing social justice and inspiration through philanthropy towards the working class does not go down well. The very idea of a Working Men’s College (even though it still exists today) is not how we would choose to describe such an initiative today. Ruskin’s idea of museums as outposts of high art to teach the best taste, with rich people devoting some of their wealth (whether monetary or artistic) to initiatives for the poor were not, and are not, very practical.

The Sheffield Winter Garden (2003)

His idea for a museum that would be designed for the workers, full of unbelievably detailed copies of the most beautiful works of art, and deliberately situated miles outside the industrial city of Sheffield, is entirely at odds with present-day museum thinking. Here was a narrowly pedagogical approach, providing what was good for you. Certainly the Ruskin Gallery has always struggled with the idea of a hands-on, “working man’s Bodleian”, something that was perhaps understandably lost in subsequent locations and arrangements of the Gallery. Even the latest incarnation of the Ruskin Exhibition in Sheffield, a single room of miscellaneous objects all selected because they are "beautiful" (in Ruskin's view), including, a vast, microscopically detailed depiction of the front of St Mark’s in Venice, a few coins, pictures of birds and flowers, and specimens of various rocks, seems something of an anachronism. Perhaps the Sheffield Winter Garden, right next to the Ruskin Gallery, and far more popular, has taken Ruskin’s message further than he was ever able to. It is beautiful, it is fun, it is free to walk around, and you can touch the plants. Who wants a stuffy museum with glass cabinets compared with this?

Is Van Eyck the greatest?

Van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece, Annunciation

The Van Eyck exhibition in Ghent is the biggest exhibition ever devoted to the painter. Any exhibition about an artist will attempt to make a case for that artist’s greatness, so I’m not surprised that several claims are made about Jan Van Eyck in this exhibition, including:

• He was responsible for an “Optical Revolution” in art
• He was highly learned in literature and theology
• He was up to date in geometry and optics
• He was one of the first artists to use oil paints (compared to tempera, widely used in Italy).
• His paintings are very highly detailed and “true to life”. 
• He was the first to use the three-quarters view for portraits

Now, while I think Van Eyck is a great artist, I don’t think the above criteria are the best way to judge his work. But in the exhibition, the captions and the audio guide pushed these points to the extent of repetitiveness, as if we visitors were a school party, and we weren’t allowed to leave without being told several times over what makes Van Eyck great. Either the insistence of the audio guide, or the claims they made, or both together, became rather annoying - annoying enough to consider their claims in more detail.

Optical Revolution

What exactly is the claimed “optical revolution”? I assumed this was an attempt to do something similar to Svetlana Alpers in her work on C17 Netherlandish art, linking developments in optics by Huygens and others to painting of the time.

In the exhibition guide (the full catalogue cost around €60 and I couldn’t afford that) the optical revolution is described as Van Eyck’s use of “the medium of oil paint, which allowed him to paint in refined details and to reproduce virtually tangible materials” [p11]. So, the “optical revolution” was the use of oil paint, and the result was Van Eyck’s startling attention to detail, because you can paint in more detail with oil than with tempera. Now, if being true to life was the criterion of greatness, then all art would have been eliminated by photography. If attention to detail were the criterion for a great artist, then every artist who painted portrait miniatures would be ranked alongside, even above, Michelangelo and Leonardo. But they are not.

The preface states “His knowledge of physics allowed him to be able to imitate optical light phenomena that are necessary to optimally evoke the spatial experience of his work … the way in which light moves through space”. Is this the optical revolution? “The meticulous observation of the world and the regard Van Eyck gave to it was not seen previously”. This doesn’t mean very much, apart from the paintings being at times full of detail.

Better than the Italians?

Masaccio, Madonna and Child, detail, c1426, Uffizi

In an attempt to demonstrate Van Eyck’s stature, the exhibition very sensibly includes other contemporary works that illustrate what was happening elsewhere, mainly in Italy. The Italian works are then shown to be inferior to Van Eyck, which is perhaps less sensible. To suggest, as the audio guide does, that Masaccio is inferior to Van Eyck is to confuse a fundamentally different artistic tradition. Masaccio was born into a classicizing culture in which objects from antiquity were still widely visible. Masaccio is in a direct line from Giotto; his figures have a solidity and classical quality utterly lacking in Van Eyck. If you compare Masaccio’s Madonna and Child of 1426 in the Uffizi, the infant Christ has a feeling of weight lacking in, say, Van Eyck’s Madonna in a Church (c1426). Incidentally, it would help if the audio guide pronounced Italian names such as “Masaccio” correctly.

 

Domenico Veneziano, Annunciation, c1442-48 (Fitzwilliam, Cambridge)

The exhibition contrasts Domenico Veneziano’s Annunciation with Van Eyck’s view of space. The contrast is apt, but the conclusions they draw are wrong:

Perhaps there exists no more adequate manner to test the Eyckian idiom and the new art from Florence from around 1440 than to compare Domenico Veneziano’s Annunciation with Van Eyck’s version of the theme from the Ghent Altarpiece … although not overly large in size, [Domenico Veneziano’s] painting has a certain monumentality. […] [p60]

Domenico, like many Italian painters, uses blank space as a positive attribute; there is no attempt to follow Van Eyck in filling every tiny portion of the canvas with detail. In this respect, Van Eyck is closer to International Gothic (with its mania for patterns and filling every possible space) than Domenico, Masaccio, and other classicizing Italian painters. Yet the curators seem to present this as a positive attribute:

In the altarpiece … [Domenico Veneziano] did his utmost best to paint a brocaded cope a la Van Eyck. Technically it is perfectly executed, but with respect to colour range, tempera cannot compete with oil paint … Van Eyck’s use of light and shadow is expressed in such a way that his figures are very physically present. [p60]

This strikes me as almost like a football supporter praising their local team in contrast to their international counterparts. Terms like "his utmost best", "cannot compete", are not the kind of objective terms I would expect in a comparison of painters in such a different tradition.

True to life

Van Eyck is great because he can imitate reality. “Formerly, the standard technique for giving objects a golden sheen was to use gold leaf. Van Eyck, on the contrary, can faultlessly imitate gold and – by extension – every material and every texture” [p15]. “Portraits were previously never so life-like than those from Van Eyck”. This isn’t the sort of language you expect from academics, who usually qualify any statement.

Van Eyck, Madonna in a Church (Berlin)

Van Eyck’s pictures are not true to life (as in like a photograph), nor to they set out to be. The figure of the Madonna in a church is way too big for the architectural detail behind her. Van Eyck, like many of his contemporaries, loved to show off his skill at drawing the fall and creases of clothes. However, this doesn’t mean the creases are true to life. The Virgin of Chancellor Rollin has exquisite folds in her dress, but they correspond to no real dress that could be photographed. Nor do the folds in Giovanni di Arnolfini's hat (below) resemble real folds.

Three-quarter view for portraits

Van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni di Arnolfini, c1438 (Berlin)

Undoubtedly Van Eyck is one of the great portraitists. It certainly looks to me as though Van Eyck pioneered the presentation of figures not in profile, but half turned towards the viewer. The effect is dramatic. This combined with Van Eyck’s gift for capturing facial expressions, makes many of his portraits among his finest works, for example, the portrait of Giovanni di Arnolfini (unfortunately not in the exhibition).

Don’t mention the missing pictures

Only around 30 paintings are by or attributed to Van Eyck in existence. This means the visitors to the Van Eyck show could reasonably be expected to see every work by the artist, Obviously, for a pre-1500 painter, many of these works will not travel to the exhibition. But instead of showing reproductions, this exhibition demonstrates a strange kind of amnesia towards the missing works – they are simply not mentioned. Does it make any sense not to mention major works such as the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait or the Madonna of Chancellor Rollin? They aren’t even mentioned in the exhibition guide.

A suggestion

Ghent is one of the most vibrant and exciting cities I have visited in the last few years. From the first room of this exhibition, it was clear that the Ghent where Van Eyck painted the famous Altarpiece was one of the most highly populated and successful merchant cities of Europe. Van Eyck was the painter of this mercantile success story. Could not more be made of this remarkable story? Could we not link Van Eyck more to his contemporary environment, and then fast forward to the present day? Today, Ghent is re-establishing its former success and, with such initiatives as extensive climate control of emissions in the city centre, again pioneering, just as Van Eyck was pioneering in the 15th century.