The Arnolfini Portrait: Story of an Icon

Useful online lecture from the National Gallery focusing on the “Arnolfini Portrait” by Van Eyck.

For many years I had a copy of this painting on my student room walls so I feel I know it well. What I didn’t know much about was how it got to the National Gallery and the effect it had on other artists. Jenny Graham, from the University of Plymouth and author of a book on the artist, took us through both those topics as well as looking at who the subjects might be.

I think the most interesting part was tracing where the painting had been since it first appeared in an inventory of Margaret of Austria in 1516 until it was bought by the National Gallery in 1843. She addressed the ambiguity of how it came to England post-Napoleonic wars feeling it was probably looted from Spain.

I got a bit confused by the section on the influence of other artists as we seemed to look in detail at the Pre-Raphaelites in the first session then return to the topic both with them and other artists of the time. In the midst of discussing theories about the work.

We ended with a look at who the sitters might be, looking at how we know it is an Arnolfini at all (a now lost inscription from an inventory) and likely candidates including the argument that the woman might be a posthumous portrait as one female candidate had died by the time the work was painted.

It was refreshing to look at the history of this painting as an object rather than diving into its symbolism which I had done before on a number of occasions.

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