The brothers Van Eyck

by Paul G. Konody

Geographically and politically, in her arts and in her industries, the country was affected by changes both radical and lasting. Some years before the period which embraces the life of the subjects of this biographical sketch, the German Ocean had invaded the northern territory of the Netherlands, and had disorganised a Parliament and divided a people. At the beginning of the thirteenth century over the whole of that low-lying and marshy tract between Kampen on the east and Amsterdam to westward, and southward to within sight of Nieukerk, the North Sea swept in upon the inland lake of Flevo, swallowing thousands of hamlets, villages, and towns suddenly and completely. Until this time there had been but one Friesland, including Holland, divided only by the Vlie, a small stream hardly to be counted a river. Now East Friesland and West Friesland were divided by this vast stretch of water, the stormy and dangerous Zuyderzee, and it became impossible for Holland to send her representatives to the general assemblies at Aurich. West Friesland was absorbed by Holland, and East Friesland became a self-governing State, and remained such until the power of Charles V. was established. Thus politically as well as geographically was the country disrupted by the forces of Nature.

To trace the rise of the Netherlands as a European Power from a more remote period than the beginning of the fourteenth century would be beyond the range of this sketch; but for the purpose of showing the general advance of the country's interests a brief summary of the events culminating in the wellnigh despotic power of the House of Burgundy may refresh the reader's mind, as they affect the constitution of the nation, and may serve to point cause and effect in the increasing prosperity of the country and in the resulting advance of art; for just as the political influence of the Burgundian Princes spread from their hereditary provinces first over Flanders and Brabant—over that part of the Netherlands which is now known as Belgium—and finally over the Dutch provinces, so the current of art swept from Burgundy to Flanders and thence to Holland.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century Holland was ruled by the House of Avennes, Counts of Hainault. Holland having previous to the accession of the Avennes annexed Zeeland, the three provinces may almost be regarded as the nucleus of the Dutch power. William IV., last of the Hainault line, died childless in 1355. His death was the signal for the outbreak of a long and spasmodic series of civil disturbances between the nobles and the cities and municipalities. These parties, known by the titles of the Hooks and the Kabblejaus (codfish), continued their intermittent strife throughout the succeeding 150 years. In the meantime William IV. was succeeded by William of Bavaria. Then followed his brother Albert, who was in turn succeeded by his son William VI. At the death of the latter the reins of government were left in the uncertain hands of his young daughter, Jacqueline, a girl of seventeen. Jacqueline, it appears, led anything but a happy life. Her cousin, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, for thirteen years plundered and robbed her, and at her death in 1437 he had already dispossessed her of her lands and reduced her from the position of Sovereign to that of Lady Forester in her own provinces, whilst for himself he had laid the foundation of that Greater Netherlands which by conquest and annexation he proceeded to extend.

Having acquired the principal Netherlands and inherited the two Burgundies and the counties of Flanders and Artois, he had purchased the county of Namur, usurped the duchy of Brabant, and annexed the barony of Mechlin. A few years later he acquired also the duchy of Luxembourg.

Philip was now the ruler of what may be termed a kingdom of several peoples, who, though in a measure distinct, were of similar temperament and character, and who may be counted now as one. Never has conqueror been in a happier position when faced with the problem of welding together his conquests. For Philip ruled those whose interests were similar, and whose characteristics were almost identical—a people born of the sea, strong and fearless, who had lived by strife with their fellows and by strife with Nature; a people born to toil and to hardship, whose battle for life had been with Nature herself—a race which for centuries had fought with swamp and water year in, year out, conquering a mile of morass or patch of barren furze, striving for the soil to live upon, working not for gold, but for life. This nation had now become a power of natural strength and of dominating physique, virile and live and expansive, whose sons, with brooms at their mastheads, should later sweep the seas from whose destructive embrace she had succeeded in wresting herself.

Under the rule of the Burgundian the prosperity of the Netherlands rapidly increased. In Holland and in Flanders, in Brabant and in the other leading provinces, industry and wealth, agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, were ever augmenting. While Philip, in the zenith of his power, flushed with the passion and success of territorial acquisition, busied himself with the glorification of his sovereignty by founding at Bruges, amid a scene of indescribable splendour, the Order of the Golden Fleece, "to the honour of God, of the Blessed Virgin, and of the holy Andrew," a principle more potent than even territorial power was evolving. For in Haarlem an undistinguished sexton wrestled with the intricacies of the printing-press. Lorenz Coster was printing his book of the Dutch language. The question as to the time and place of the invention of printing will probably never be settled to the satisfaction of Holland and Germany; but the men of Haarlem still claim upon very sound and substantial evidence that between 1423 and 1440 their citizen was the first to employ movable type, which is generally considered the invention of printing proper, as distinguished from the more ancient block-printing.

Whatever objection may be legitimately raised to the application of the title "The Good" to a ruler of Philip's character, this Burgundian had many of the qualities that go to the making of a successful monarch. His military talents were considerable; his political methods, though despotic, were practicable. Though he taxed the wealth of his country, he protected and encouraged the commerce and manufactures of Holland and Flanders, their arts and crafts, science and literature. He founded at Bruges the famous Burgundian Library. He remodelled, and to some extent endowed, the University of Louvain. His munificence and princely generosity attracted to his Court at Bruges men of letters like Oliver de la Marche and Philippe de Commines, and famous painters like Jan van Eyck, and perhaps, though we lack documentary evidence, his elder brother Hubert, who gave, perhaps, more to the art of painting than even did Coster to the art of printing, or Philip himself to the sciences of statesmanship and war.

The most salient points in the life and work of these two brothers, who close the period of stiff Gothic medievalism and stand on the threshold of modern art, and whose improvements in the technical methods of their art opened up to their successors unthought-of possibilities, are shrouded in deep mystery, and the most recent research to which a number of thoroughly competent scientific experts have devoted themselves, whilst producing many ingenious theories and deductions, has, in a certain sense, added to the confusion by throwing doubt upon the authenticity of documents and inscriptions which had formerly passed undisputed, and formed the basis of the unstable edifice that had been erected around the vague fame of the brothers Van Eyck. This uncertainty begins with the parentage and the place and date of birth of the two masters, and extends to the two supreme achievements to which they owe their fame—the reputed invention of oil-painting, which was variously ascribed to Hubert and Jan, then denied to both of them, and, finally, given back to Hubert in the form of an improvement on the methods of oil-painting practised during the period; and the much-quoted inscription on the famous Ghent altar-piece, The Adoration of the Lamb, which has been, and must remain, the starting-point for all research in this matter, even though the late Henri Bouchot, Keeper of the Print Cabinet of the Bibliothèque Nationale, suggests that this inscription may have been added when the picture was restored in the middle of the sixteenth century. At every turn we are faced by similar doubts and contradictions, especially in the case of Hubert, about whose life and doings we have so little documentary evidence that we have to fall back entirely upon conjecture and deduction.