Van Eyck: The Portraits
For the first time in history, see all of Jan van Eyck’s portraits together.
21 November 2026 – 11 April 2027 London: The National Gallery
Few painters have changed the course of art history as fundamentally as Jan van Eyck. Working in Bruges in the early fifteenth century, this Netherlandish master did not merely perfect the art of portraiture — he invented it as we know it today. Before van Eyck, painted likenesses were stylised and symbolic, reserved for royalty and the Church. Van Eyck changed all of this, capturing merchants, craftsmen, his own wife, and possibly himself with a startling, almost uncanny realism that had never been seen before.
The secret was oil paint. Van Eyck developed a technique of layering translucent glazes that allowed him to render skin texture, the shimmer of fabric, reflections in jewels and eyes — details so precise they read like observation, not art. The faces that emerge from his panels seem to breathe. Six centuries later, their ability to astonish is entirely intact.
Van Eyck’s were the first faces that were genuinely lifelike. You would recognise his sitters if you walked by them on the street.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime event. All nine of van Eyck’s surviving painted portraits are being brought together from collections across Europe for the first and only time. Because these works are so precious and fragile — many have not travelled in decades — the National Gallery describes this gathering as something that can happen only here, and only now.
Among the highlights: the Gallery’s own Arnolfini Portrait (1434), the most visited painting on its website, will be displayed for the first time alongside a related panel from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, believed to depict the same sitter. The recently conserved Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?, 1433) will hang beside Margaret, the Artist’s Wife (1439) — the first known portrait of a woman who was not of noble birth. And for the first time in their history, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum will lend both its van Eyck paintings simultaneously.
On kunstfinder.com you’ll find works by Jan van Eyck and many of the artists who shaped the Northern Renaissance — catalogued with full details, museum locations and images. Use the artist pages as your companion to this show.
Visitor information
National Gallery, London
21 November 2026 – 11 April 2027
Daily 10am–6pm · Fri & Sat until 10pm · nationalgallery.org.uk
