At the National Gallery in London, between late 2026 and spring 2027, one of the most ambitious projects ever devoted to Jan van Eyck takes shape. Van Eyck: The Portraits brings together, for the first time, all nine painted portraits by the artist known today. It is a number that carries weight: those nine panels account for roughly half of the surviving autograph works, just over twenty in total, and help explain why a gathering of this kind is, in effect, unrepeatable. The focus is not a retrospective, but a tightly framed investigation into a genre that, with van Eyck, undergoes a decisive shift. In the fifteenth-century Burgundian Netherlands, the portrait ceases to be a typified image and becomes individual recognition, presence, psychology. The exhibition traces this transition through the faces that truly populate the artist’s world: not kings and queens, but prosperous merchants, successful craftsmen, members of his own family. It is also a social narrative, because it coincides with a moment when access to representation expands and the power of the image moves from rank to the person. Among the key themes announced is a network of “reunions” designed to test identities and attributions. The Arnolfini Portrait from the National Gallery is shown for the first time alongside a panel depicting the same possible sitter, now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Another crucial dialogue involves the celebrated Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) from the National Gallery, presented next to the Portrait of Margaret, the artist’s wife, painted in 1439 and now in Bruges, identified as the first known portrait of a woman outside the aristocracy. The exhibition also announces an exceptional loan from Vienna: the Kunsthistorisches Museum has authorised the simultaneous travel of both its van Eycks, a rare event for paintings so fragile and seldom moved.
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