Jan van Eyck

Born around 1390 in Maaseik, Limburg, van Eyck was already running a workshop by 1422 when he entered service in The Hague as painter and valet de chambre to John III the Pitiless. After John's death in 1425, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, appointed him court painter and valued him enough to send him on diplomatic missions, including a 1428 trip to Lisbon to negotiate Philip's marriage to Isabella of Portugal. Van Eyck moved to Bruges in 1429 and spent his final decade there, paid well and told to paint "whenever he pleased." About twenty paintings survive, plus the Ghent Altarpiece and illuminated miniatures, most from 1432 to 1439 and signed with his punning motto ALS ICH KAN - "As I can" - typically rendered in Greek characters. He painted altarpieces, polyptychs, and commissioned portraits, moving past the International Gothic style into something harder, more exact: naturalism pushed to a new pitch through his command of oil. He died in Bruges on 9 July 1441, having set the terms for everything that followed in the north.