Van Eyck: The Portraits brings together all ten of Jan van Eyck’s surviving portraits from across Europe for the first time in history, running at the National Gallery from 21 November 2026 to 11 April 2027.
Van Eyck’s paintings barely travel. The Arnolfini Portrait, the National Gallery’s own most-visited painting, has left the building only once in over a century. So a show that gathers nine painted portraits plus van Eyck’s only surviving drawing, roughly half of everything that survives by his hand, is the kind of exhibition that genuinely will not happen again in most visitors’ lifetimes. The Gallery isn’t being coy about that either: this is being billed internally as once-in-a-lifetime, and for once that’s not exhibition-marketing inflation.
Reunions that will never happen again
The exhibition is built around pairings that have never existed before. The Arnolfini Portrait will hang for the first time ever alongside a Berlin panel showing the same sitter, evidence that van Eyck painted this man twice, unheard of for anyone who wasn’t a ruler at the time. Van Eyck’s only surviving drawing, the Portrait of an Elderly Man, will be reunited with the painting it directly inspired for only the second time ever, on loan from Dresden and Vienna respectively. Vienna is also lending both of its van Eyck paintings simultaneously for the first time in its history, including the Portrait of Jan de Leeuw, a goldsmith who makes direct eye contact with the viewer, an effect van Eyck appears to have invented. And van Eyck’s newly conserved probable self-portrait will hang beside his portrait of his wife Margaret, the first dated identifiable portrait of a woman who wasn’t aristocracy.
Why Van Eyck matters
Before van Eyck, portraits were about projecting status, not capturing a specific face. His sitters have bloodshot eyes, stubble, untidy hair, the actual texture of being a particular person rather than a generalised idea of one. He also signed and dated his work, sometimes down to the day, at a time when most artists stayed anonymous, and painted the backs and frames of his panels to imitate marble and metal so convincingly that the exhibition is showing several portraits in the round for the first time, backs included.
Curator Emma Capron puts it plainly: portraiture as a genre doesn’t really have a slow build, it “bursts onto the scene fully formed” under van Eyck in the 1430s.
The London x London Take: Small exhibition, huge stakes, this is a show built from about fifteen objects total rather than a blockbuster room-count, and that’s exactly why it works. Every single piece in it is doing real art-historical work rather than padding out a crowd-pleaser. Book this one regardless of how much you think you know about Netherlandish painting, the point of the show is that you’ll recognise these faces as people rather than history. Members get priority booking and go free, worth joining for this alone if you visit exhibitions more than once a year.
Need to Know
- Where: The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
- When: 21 November 2026 to 11 April 2027
- Price: To be announced; members go free with priority booking from 22 September
- Booking: nationalgallery.org.uk
