All of Jan van Eyck's portraits are shown together for the first time, at the National Gallery from 21 November 2026 to 11 April 2027.
Jan van Eyck painted in Bruges in the 1430s and did something nobody had done: he worked in oil thinly, in layers, so that light passes into the paint and comes back out, which is why a van Eyck face at five hundred and ninety years old still looks lit from inside. He also painted what he saw rather than what a face was supposed to look like: the stubble, the bloodshot eye, the fur. The National Gallery owns two of them, including the Arnolfini portrait, the most argued-over picture in the building.
Fewer than a dozen portraits survive. They are held across Europe and America, they are small, fragile and almost never lent, and no one has ever seen them in one room. He also signed and dated his pictures, at a time when few painters did, and one of them carries the line that he was here — a painter putting himself into the room as a witness.
They are brought together at the National Gallery from Saturday 21 November 2026 to Sunday 11 April 2027 — all of them, and the Gallery is explicit that it will happen only this once. It has five months, a function of how long the negotiation took rather than of the size of the show: a dozen small panels, and the strongest claim any London exhibition will make this decade.