Hubert van Eyck

• 1. Introduction

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  Hubert van Eyck died on or before the 18th of September 1426, probably still in his thirties. Yet nobody can point to a single painting finished entirely by his own hand. For generations he carried a reputation as one of the pioneering figures behind Early Netherlandish painting. That reputation cast him as the older brother of the far more famous Jan van Eyck. He's credited with starting two works, the Ghent Altarpiece and The Three Marys at the Tomb, though historians think Jan finished both after he died. How did a painter praised in his own century come to leave nothing that can be proven his alone? And why does his younger brother's name now eclipse his?

• 2. A Life In Fragments

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  Maaseik, a town in what is now Belgium's Limburg province, is the probable birthplace of Hubert, born around 1385-90. He grew up in a family of the gentry that also produced his siblings Jan, Lambert, and Margareta, all painters.

  Because Hubert was an uncommon name, historians link him to a "Magister Hubertus, Pictor" paid in 1409. That payment covered panels for the church of Onze Lieve Vrouwe at Tongeren. That same identification likely extends to the Master Hubert who painted a panel for Jan de Visch van der Capelle. In 1413, Capelle bequeathed that panel to his daughter, a Benedictine nun near Grevelingen.

  Hubert never appears in guild records. When he died, his heirs included no children. Those gaps have led some historians to suspect he held minor religious orders, perhaps attached to the abbey that later became Saint Bavo's Cathedral. He had settled in Ghent by around 1420, the city where his one documented commission was about to begin.

• 3. The Unfinished Commission

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  Saint Bavo's in Ghent holds Hubert's one surviving documented work, an altarpiece he began around the time he settled in the city or shortly after. Work on it continued long past his death, and it wasn't finished until 1432, six years later. That gap has left scholars arguing over how much of the surviving panels are really his rather than his brother Jan's.

  A frame inscription once addressed the question directly. Destroyed in the Beeldenstorm of 1566, it declared that Hubert, "maior quo Nemo reports" (greater than anyone), started the altarpiece. It also said that Jan, calling himself "arte Secundus" (second best in the art), completed it in 1432. Today historians tend to read that inscription as an overly generous tribute from one brother to another.

  Writing in 1933, the art historian Bryson Burroughs called Hubert "the fountainhead of northern painting." He argued that Hubert laid down the underdrawing, with Jan painting the final layers after his death. Some specialists still hold a version of that view. Scientific study of the panels has since found real differences between the underdrawing, the lower paint layers, and the finished surface. Untangling any of it is complicated further, since other artists from the brothers' own workshop likely worked on the altarpiece too.

• 4. Death And Its Legends

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  The city of Ghent had commissioned a painting from him, and its magistrates inspected his workshop in 1425 to review two designs he had prepared. He died the following year. Van Vaernewijck, a 16th century writer, recorded that Hubert was laid to rest inside Saint Bavo's Cathedral alongside his sister Margareta. That writer also describes Margareta as unmarried and a painter in her own right. His heirs went on to settle tax obligations tied to properties he had held in Ghent.

  A copper inscription once recorded his date of death on the tombstone itself. That plate has since gone missing. Legend from that same century claimed his arm endured as a holy relic, housed in a casket above the entrance to Saint Bavo's. Van Vaernewijck passed down another story too, that Jan had learned the craft from his older brother. But the earliest surviving record of Jan, dated August 1422, already calls him a "master" at work in The Hague.

• 5. A Long Argument Over Credit

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  The Turin-Milan Hours alone shows the traces of several different painters' hands. That mix is part of a much larger argument over which works belong to Hubert, which to young Jan, and which to other artists entirely. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, historians took the frame inscription at face value. They handed Hubert credit for most of the unsigned paintings now linked to young Jan's early career. That trend reversed by the mid-20th century, when specialists pulled attribution away from Hubert almost entirely. In recent decades, his reputation has partly recovered, though opinion among specialists remains divided.

  The Three Marys at the Tomb now hangs in Rotterdam's Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Another artist finished that panel decades later, and later restoration work has left its own damage. Two drawings add further threads to his attributed body of work. One set, depicting the Apostles, is held at the Albertina in Vienna. A British Museum sheet, meanwhile, copies a lost Capture of Christ that connects to sections of the Ghent Altarpiece.