Free Stealing the Mystic Lamb by Noah Charney Page B

Eyck’s role as court painter required his participation in a wide variety of painting and design-related enterprises beyond wall and panel painting. In fact, panel paintings were very low on the priority list for court painters, whose primary tasks involved wall painting to decorate official residences, manuscript illumination, and the design of events. There are strikingly few references to panel paintings in Flemish court inventories, indicating the low importance given to them. In the main, only portraits, kept for historical record, would be assigned to court painters. These artists would more likely be tasked with painting temporary installations for a ducal festival or banquet. In the mid-1430s Duke Philip held a banquet at which a huge pie was rolled out of the kitchen: A man dressed as an eagle leapt out of it, followed by a flurry of doves, which then landed on the tables of the guests. It is almost certain that designing banquets such as that one, and the decoration of foodstuffs, occupied van Eyck’s time.
    After the January 1430 wedding of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal, with his political and ambassadorial work well done, Jan finally settled in Bruges. He married a woman described in contemporary documents as “damoiselle Marguerite,” suggesting that she may have had aristocratic lineage. Their first child was born in 1434 and christened Philippot, named after his godfather, Duke Philip the Good. A portrait of Mrs. van Eyck, painted by her husband in 1439, shows her clothed in garments associated with the nobility. It is the only extant stand-alone portrait of a girl or woman by van Eyck. Jan painted a self-portrait, a pendant to accompany the portrait of his wife, both of which hung in the Bruges painters’ guild in the eighteenth century. The Portrait of Marguerite was lashed onto the guild wall with heavy iron chains, because the Self-Portrait of Jan had been stolen at an unknown date from the guildhall.
Some scholars have guessed that the Man in a Red Turban, which hangs in London’s National Gallery, is the stolen self-portrait, as its size is nearly identical to that of the Portrait of Marguerite , as would be the case for matching pendant portraits.
    From 1432 until his death, Bruges town records indicate that van Eyck made annual mortgage payments on a house and workshop, which was owned by the church of Saint Donatian, in which he would ultimately be buried. That same year, records note that the councilors of the city of Bruges visited van Eyck’s studio in an official capacity, welcoming the great master to the city and lavishly handing out tips to Jan’s twelve studio assistants. His career as a secret agent appears to have ended when domestic duties called, although he would undertake two more missions to “foreign lands” in order to conduct “secret business” on behalf of the duke in 1436, to an undisclosed location, for which he received double his normal pay. He undertook a final mission, to pick up “certain panels and other secret items” and deliver them to the duke, in the winter of 1440. There is a record of Jan having been repaid for the expenses related to this last mission in January 1441, just six months before he passed away.
    Van Eyck’s various travels certainly interrupted the painting of The Ghent Altarpiece . It was completed only after he had moved from Ghent to nearby Bruges. But Jan still kept in contact with the city of Ghent and its patrons—his Saint Barbara (1437) was commissioned by a man from Ghent.
    Jan was close to Duke Philip, a confidante as well as an employee of the Burgundian leader and by some accounts his friend. The duke ultimately became godfather to one of Jan’s children, Philippot (the Duke presented the van Eycks with six silver goblets as a birthday present). Through the end of his life, Jan retained the position of painter to the duke, along with the accompanying salary of 720 livres per year (around $120,000 today). The duke