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Updated: June 15, 2025
In the days of Fra Angelico and the Van Eycks, art was the means by which painters brought before men sacred subjects, to whose design painters looked with more or less of conviction and feeling.
The invention of painting in oil, for which the Van Eycks are commonly known, was not literally that of mixing colours with oil, which was occasionally done before their day.
He seems to have worked chiefly in Venice where there was a fine school of painting during the Renaissance Period; his senior Giovanni Bellini, one of the early great painters of Venice, some of whose pictures are in the National Gallery, taught him much. It is also said that Antonello went to the Netherlands and there learnt the method of laying paint on panel invented by the Van Eycks.
Be that as it may, the works of the van Eycks and their successors are all in oils, and there is no doubt that the employment of this medium from the first considerably influenced the style, colour, and execution of all the works of this school.
Flowers by Van Huysum, David, and Heim; butterflies painted by Abraham Mignon; Van Eycks, undoubted Cranachs and Albrecht Durers; the Giorgione, the Sebastian del Piombo; Backhuijzen, Hobbema, Gericault, the rarities of painting none of these things so much as aroused their curiosity; they were waiting for the sun to arise and shine upon these treasures.
It may be true, though I doubt it, that his father's teaching was his only technical school. But if he was, as to the last he gloried in being, the child of the Old Period, he was much more truly the immediate pupil of the Van Eycks than of his father's irresolute ideals; while Basel was his university.
It is not painting that is the lost art, but faith. Men like the Van Eycks, Rogier van der Weyden, Memling, and Gerard David were princes of their craft and saw their religion with eyes undimmed by doubt. James Weak has destroyed the legend that Hans Memling painted his St. Ursula for the benefit of St. Jean's Hospital as a recompense for treatment while sick there.
The gentlemen of the army pretend that no horse can be good that has not what they call blood; but Jack and Moses are both of the Dutch breed, and the Schuylers and the Ten Eycks will never own there is no "blood" in such a stock. I have given each of these animals my own name, and call them Jack Ten Eyck and Moses Ten Eyck."
In the paintings of Francois Clouet, for example, or rather of the Clouets for there was a whole family of them painters remarkable for their resistance to Italian influences, there is a silveriness of colour and a clearness of expression which distinguish them very definitely from their Flemish neighbours, Hemling or the Van Eycks. And this nicety is not less characteristic of old French poetry.
In his researches, he discovered the use of linseed and nut oil, which he found most siccative. This is generally believed to have happened about 1410. There is however, a great deal of contradiction among writers as to the van Eycks, no two writers being found to agree.
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