More than meets the eye
Girl in a Green Gown: the history
and mystery of The Arnolfini Portrait Carola Hicks
CHATTO & WINDUS, 272PP, £16.99 ■Tablet bookshop price £15.30 Tel 01420 592974
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cores of books have examined the “world’s most famous painting”, the enigmatic Mona Lisa with her uncertain identity, her abduction and Hello-ish celebrity; far fewer the work established for over a century among Britain’s favourite paintings. The Arnolfini Portrait is just as baffling, almost as uncertain as to its sitters, and has enjoyed an even more roller coaster career, passing through the royal families of the Burgundian, Holy Roman and Napoleonic Empires before being excitingly “liberated” by a British cavalry officer in the wake of Waterloo. It has generated huge amounts of disagreement and flutterings in art- historical dovecotes, mainly in the form of academic articles or single chapters. Carola Hicks is one of the few authors to devote a whole book to the making, meaning and adventures of this beloved painting – and her work is tragically posthumous, as she died in 2010 while completing it. Her husband, Gary Hicks, and editor, Jenny Uglow, have tied up loose ends and groomed it for publication, producing a brilliantly idiosyncratic investigation which alternates chapters internal to the picture (the fashions, the furniture, the oranges, the mirror) with chapters on its production and historical meanderings. We start with Jan van Eyck’s promotion
in 1425 as official painter to Philip the Good of Burgundy. Philip and his father transformed a small French duchy into a state which engulfed much of the southern Netherlands and northern France, and whose court became the cultural centre of Europe. At times the court settled in Bruges, prosperous with merchants and bankers from every known country, who were beginning to want artistic immortalisation, like the kings and aristocrats they serviced. One of these banking/mercantile families was that of the Arnolfini from Lucca, a name first linked with the painting in a 1516 inventory of the collection of Marguerite of Austria. However, we still aren’t precisely sure which Arnolfini pair was meant; probably not the first candidate, Giovanni, who married six years after Van Eyck’s death; possibly Nicolao, with either his first (dead) wife, or his second … The question of who the sitters were opens multiplying possibilities of the painting’s meaning – if we should be requiring meaning at all: as Hicks points out, “Being aware of the speculations about this couple … adds layers of complexity
The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, 1434. National Gallery, London
All this while it was steadily acquiring recognition and praise. Scholars worked on its provenance (and meaning), and the Victorian public took it to their hearts. Baron Rothschild declared it “the one picture in the National Gallery for which I would pay literally any price and commit any folly”. Now it has entered the virtual world, its public is immense and equally devoted; it appears in advertisements, cartoons and novels, and we are even more enchanted by its enigma. Lynn Roberts
which can distract rather than enlighten.” Thus, is this a painting of a pre-nuptial betrothal scene? – a marriage forced by the bride’s “condition”? (Or is this condition one of costume rather than conception?) Does it commemorate a bride dead in childbed, with a guttered candle above her head, a lighted one above his? Is it a power of attorney, passed from travelling husband to powerful wife? Or simply a memorial of a happy marriage, an anniversary photograph? We know much of its later history, from early in the sixteenth century when it had left (putative) Arnolfini possession for the ownership of Diego de Guevara, servant of Archduke Philip the Handsome, who was heir to both Burgundian and Hapsburg empires. At that point it seems still to have had its original frame, with shutters which Diego decorated with his arms and motto. It then passed to Marguerite of Austria, regent of the united empire, and to her niece, Marie of Hungary, who kept it in her fabulous Kubla Khan-like palace of Binche in Hainault. Its first narrow squeak came when the French razed Binche in 1554. By 1558 it was in Spain, inherited by Philip II, husband of Mary Tudor; having a second near miss in the 1734 fire in the Alcazar palace; popping up in inventories; and finally falling to the Bonapartes. Joseph was made the “uninvited king” of Spain by Napoleon in 1808, and (to his credit) managed to stave off his brother’s demands for Spanish art for four years, planning his own national gallery in the Prado. But before the portrait could enter this ambitious pipe dream, the allied armies descended, forcing Joseph to flee. He packed the whole Spanish art collection and set off in a vast convoy of troops and refugees, only to be pounced on at Vitoria, where he abandoned his loot (and silver chamber pot). The portrait “came into the possession of” Colonel James Hay, who in 1842 sold it for 600 guineas to the infant National Gallery in London.
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