Every surviving portrait by Jan van Eyck, the painter who first made oil paint hold light, is shown together at the National Gallery, only once.
Every surviving portrait by Jan van Eyck goes on show under one roof at The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square from Saturday 21 November 2026. The Gallery says the assembly will happen only once.
Van Eyck painted in Bruges in the 1430s. He worked in oil thinly and in layers, so light passes into the paint and comes back out. His faces still seem lit from inside nearly six centuries later.
He painted what he saw rather than an ideal face: the stubble, the bloodshot eye, the fur. He signed and dated his pictures when few painters did, and one of them carries the line that he was here.
Fewer than a dozen of his portraits survive. They are small and fragile, held across Europe and America, and almost never lent. No one has ever seen them in one room.
The National Gallery owns two of them, including the Arnolfini Portrait, the most argued-over picture in the building. The exhibition runs until Sunday 11 April 2027.