The number of qualified miniaturists was at the beginning of the fifteenth century very great, and many of them were very influenced by each other. There are, however, not many cases when a certain work is documented to have been executed by a certain artist. As a consequence of this fact many attributions are airy. In M Meiss’s and E H Beatson’s edition of Belles heures (1974) the miniature of the Agony in the Garden is characterized as the most sophisticated and most perfect miniature by Jean in the manuscript. On the other hand the beauty of the intertwined volumes should imply a design by Jean’s brother Pol de Limbourg.

It is not mentioned, however, that this painting is to be found mirrored in some details in the so-called Turin-Milan Hours (Museo Civico, Turin). The version there is among those that are thought to have been executed by the so-called Master H, but as E König newly has suggested the painting is probably not part of this group of added miniatures. There is of course the possibility that the artist may have had in his hands if not the Belles heures at least some copy of this motif. The coincidence opens, however, also for the possibility that the artist, who with such force has painted the ironic Agony in the Garden in the Turin-Milan Hours, in fact may be the same artist who once as a young man added the apostles Peter and John on a landscape by a Limbourg brother in the Belles heures. And that this unusually talented artist may be the same one who in the last-mentioned book introduced the contemporary motif with the Duke of Berry on a Journey.

Painted at about the same time as the four realistic scenes in the Calendar part of the Très riches heures are illuminations in Le livre des merveilles du monde (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris), a book known to have been presented to the Duke of Berry by John the Fearless in January 1413. Among the many illuminations in this collection of travel reports the best are interpreted to have been executed by the anonymous so-called Boucicaut Master and another anonymous named the Bedford Master. It is mostly interpreted that this book should have been produced around the years 1410-13. It may be possible, however, to suggest a very probable date for its presentation to Duke John, as his fortieth birthday was on 28 May 1411. The presentation page was probably painted later in memory of this event.

In this solemn family scene John the Fearless is seen sitting on a spacious sofa, receiving the book, which surely had required great effort to produce. Behind him stands to the left a rather young man, who seems to be dressed as a French prince and may be Louis of Guyenne, already interested in art in his early years, now 15-year-old and for a period at the Burgundian court. The young man beside the supposed Dauphin Louis may then reasonably be Duke John’s son, the 14-year-old Philip of Charolais. There is some probability that the couple in the background is meant to show Adolph of Cleves and his wife Marie of Burgundy, John of Burgundy’s sister. It seems as if this couple has just put away the book’s cover and if so they are presenting themselves as the donors. The several times painted words Ich swighe, two times spelled Ich suighe, is in the language of Adolph of Cleves and may be meant to express the duke’s great surprise. The miniature is normally ascribed to the so-called Boucicaut Master, often thought to be the French-speaking Jacques Coene. It seems, however, as if two different artists have been involved, and maybe none of them was the Boucicaut Master. The best one of them may have painted only the portrait of John the Fearless, possibly based on a portrait by this duke’s court painter Jean Malouel.

In a late addition to the Petites heures de Jean, duc de Berry (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) there is a magnificent miniature of a nightly scene showing the old Jean of Berry leaving a palace in company with several courtiers. Guiding them is a young man whose exquisite bright red and white dress may indicate that he is a royal prince, reasonably Dauphin Louis of Guyenne. Jean of Berry is holding a walking stick in his left hand, and at his right side he has a short baton of the type that is known as a symbol of the Orléans party. What we see is probably Duke Jean and friends flying in the dark during the so-called Caboche uprising in Paris in 1413, when the duke fearing for his life was offered by his physician S Aligret to take refuge for some time in the cloister of the Cathedral of Paris, maybe the building seen on a hill in the right background. The supposed Dauphin Louis is represented as a kind of guardian angel, which is made even more evident by an angel in the sky dressed just as the guiding man and pointing in the same direction.

Both the outstanding quality of this miniature, and the fact that it represents contemporary persons acting together, link this painting to the four wonderfully painted courtly scenes in the Calendar part of the Très riches heures. Showing the dauphin as a divine hero, the painting was probably commissioned by him and therefore most likely executed by his own court painter Haincelin de Haguenot, the artist whom P Durrieu mentions as the dauphin’s enlumineur en titre and varlet de chambre in the years 1409-15. Looking again at the four Calendar paintings we find the young man supposed to be Dauphin Louis represented as a principle person also in nearly all of these. This points definitely at him as the most likely commissioner of this part of the Calendar. Haincelin has earlier tentatively been identified with the anonymous Master of the Bedford Hours, an artist who is thought to have run an important workshop at this time. This theory is obviously a mistake, because the Bedford Master’s style is both weaker and different from that in the four Calendar paintings. And the generally accepted idea that it should have been one or the other of the Limbourg brothers that painted also these famous Calendar scenes must be seriously questioned.

One document mentions that Haincelin, peintre demeurant à Paris, as early as 1403 had painted arms and devices on two leather containers for books for Queen Isabeau. On 22 May 1407 the Italian business agent J Raponde was reimbursed for what he had paid to three artists pour faire histoires in a bible commissioned by Philip the Bold of Burgundy. Duke John the Fearless, the son of the in the meantime deceased Philip, had authorised J Durant, his physician and counsellor, to arrange this payment, which covered outlays of 24 francs to Ymbert Stanier, enlumineur, on l March 1403, of 20 francs to Jacques Coene, peintre, on 3 May 1403 and of 16 francs to Hainsselin de Haguenot, enlumineur, on 17 May 1404. As Easter was on March 30 in 1404, all the three payments were made this year.

A commission to paint in a bible for the artistically very advanced Burgundian court was of course only given to very professional artists, preferably the very best of them. Coene was so famous that he on 13 April 1399 was one of three experts that were called from Paris to help at the planning of the big Dome in Milan. It is also known that King Juan I of Aragon in 1388 wrote a letter to Vicomte de Rhodez in Paris asking him to arrange that Coene was sent to him as an artist que sapia ben formar et propriament divisar figures de persones e resemblar fisonomies de cares. The diplomat Raymond de Perillos, Vicomte de Rodès, then living in Paris, had contacts with among else the dukes of Burgundy and Orléans and with the pope of Avignon. His knowledge of Coene was probably based on a visit at the court of Jean of Berry in 1386, when he negotiated for a planned but then never realised marriage between Juan of Aragon’s eldest daughter Jeanne and Berry’s eldest son Jean.

King Juan had in his marriage since 1384 to Yoland of Bar also the younger daughter Yoland (Jolanta) of Aragon, who in 1400 married Louis II of Anjou, King of Naples. The intelligent and early widowed Yoland of Aragon is known both as collector of illuminated books and as active in the power play at the French court. It was she who arranged that her daughter Marie in 1413 was engaged to Prince Charles of France, the later King Charles VII, also that her son René of Anjou in 1419 was adopted by Cardinal Louis of Bar, the very honoured man I have guessed is sitting beside the Duke of Berry in the January miniature in the Très riches heures de Jean, duc de Berry. Martin of Aragon, Yoland’s cousin, married in 1400 Blanche of Navarre, a daughter of King Charles III, known as commissioner at this time of the remarkable Hours of Charles le Noble (Cleveland Museum of Art), interpreted to have been illuminated by the so-called Brussels Initials Master, an artist who in my opinion may be identical with Jacques Coene.

The differently spelled name of Haincelin (Hainsselin, Lancelin) de Haguenot tells us that this artist probably was a very young man, that his real name ought to be Johannes and that he was called Hänslein in his native German language. The second part of the name, Haguenot (Haguenoe), is by interpreters erroneously corrected to Hagenau, guessing that he might have come from this town not very far north of Strasbourg, a place that it is difficult to connect at this time to the art milieu of Paris or Burgundy. Knowing the great number of medieval names that are misread or miswritten it seems reasonable to guess, that the young Johannes may instead originally have come to Paris from The Hague.

Johannes (Hans, Jan, Jean) was certainly the name of a great number of contemporary artists, only a few of them, probably only one of them, however, talented enough to paint masterpieces as the four courtly Calendar miniatures. It has never been possible to document when and where Jan van Eyck was born. It is most often guessed that he should have been born around 1395. He may, however, quite as well have been born in the middle and even in the early years of the 1380s and then in younger years for some time connected, maybe as a journeyman, to the very art interested court in The Hague. There he is later documented to be working as a court painter earliest in August 1422.

Many of the artists named Jean that were working at the same time at the same places were distinguished from each other by the addition of some characterizing epitet. Jan van Eyck may earliest have been known as Haincelin in order to distinguish him from his in art circles well-known father who thus also may have been called Johannes (Jean, Jan). This gives us a hint to identifying the father among contemporary well-known artists. Some circumstances pointing in the direction of a sculptor Jean de Liège would certainly be worth investigating, especially as there is a tradition that John of Bavaria, who from August 1422 had Jan van Eyck as his court painter, should have learnt to know him as elected Bishop of Liège, an office from which he retired in 1417.

No document at all informs us of Jan van Eyck’s artistic education. Secondary sources claim, however, that he should have been educated in his brother Hubert’s atelier, also that he should have started his career as an illuminator. Among the characteristics of the Calendar paintings that remind of his known paintings in the service of Philip the Good are of course the outstanding mastership and the particular interest in realism. One may also recognize somewhat of the cool irony that we know from Fishing Party in Musée du Louvre and the so-called Hawking Party in Versailles, works that since long have been put in connection with Van Eyck.

Copyright © 2001-2007 Knut Andersson. All rights reserved.