Jan Van Eyck Quotes

I’ve had so many influences and sources of inspiration as an illustrator that it is impossible to name just one. I loved Aubrey Beardsley when I was a student, and then Edmund Dulac and other Golden Age illustrators made a big impact, as well as Victorian painters like Richard Dadd and Edward Burne-Jones. My long-term heroes though are Albretch Durer, Brueghel, Hieronymous Bosch, Jan Van Eyck, Leonardo, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Turner and Degas. What most of them have in common is brilliant draughtsmanship and a strong linear or graphic quality. Most are also printmakers. The one I keep going back to and who fascinates me the most is JMW Turner, the greatest watercolourist.

Michiel Kistgens and Jan de Haes, brothers-in-law (and Mennonites), are one example of this dynamic. Among the numbers of Amsterdam merchants whom the Haarlemmer Hans Baert was chasing for payment in June 1637 were Kistgens and De Haes. On January 18 the pair had bought for f 1,25o an Admirael van der Eyck bulb weighing 18o asen. The bulb was at that moment growing in the garden of Jan Woutersz in Haarlem, and, like so many, they seem to have been reluctant to pay for their purchase.

Musée du Louvre and see Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait. Full of symbols, it is, but also tagged with the artist himself. So clever!

The ducal court Jan van Eyck had entered in 1425 was a vibrant, ostentatious, sometimes ribald place.