The spelling of names differs often very much in medieval times, both when written by the persons themselves and even more when written by scribes. Quite remarkable differences may occur when names are transcribed from one national language or dialect to another, e g when the French name Rogelet de la Pasture becomes the Flemish Rogier van der Weyden. The experienced A Châtelet goes e g as long as to suggest, that a name Lambrecht might have been mistaken for Albert, when trying to establish an identity for Albert van Ouwater.

As regards Jan van Eyck’s brother Hubert we have to deal with the following facts. Already in 1409 a Magister Hubertus pictor is documented in the region, and in 1413 a painter Master Hubert. In 1424/25 the city accounts of Ghent mention that meester Luberecht was paid for two designs for paintings, and in 1425/26 that patrons visiting the workshop had given a gratuity to den kinderen te meester Ubrechts, that is to his apprentices. From a will dated 9 March 1426 is known, that meester Hubrechte den scildere was working on an image of St Anthony and other things for an altar.

There are good reasons to assume, that at least most of these mentionings of a skilled and respected master Hubert refer to the elder brother of Jan van Eyck, who the canons of the church mentioned in 1517, only that they called him Robertus, which is a reasonable version of Hubert, especially if the artist was living in a French-speaking town. None of the documents about master Hubert states, however, that he should have been a master in Ghent. He may as well have lived in e g the nearby French enclave Tournai, at this time one of the world’s most lively art centres. He may there have received commissions from other places, as his reputation must have been very big.

In Tournai lived the respected master Robert Campin, who by most scholars and for very good reasons is considered to be identical with the so-called Master of Flémalle, to whom a few outstanding paintings are ascribed, an œuvre which is crucial for the history of early Netherlandish painting. Campin, most likely born c. 1378/79, is known from a great number of documents until his death in 1444/45. Not a single painting with his signature is, however, known, and none of the documents refers to any identified preserved painting. He is for the first time mentioned in Tournai in 1405/06, where he purchased citizen’s rights in 1410. He was frequently employed by the municipality and churches. Between 1425 and 1427 he was dean of the Guild of St Luke. He owned houses and was running what may have been the biggest atelier in Tournai, in which Rogier van der Weyden, Jacques Daret and other artists of the highest ability got their education.

The documents show that Campin’s activity was all-round, from more or less simple decorations to figural paintings. It has been guessed, that his work also should have included illuminations in books, at this time an important occupation for many artists, because his pupil Jacques Daret later taught on this speciality. This suggestion is now strongly strengthened; in the article Jan van Eyck as Miniature Painter at the French Court I have published arguments showing that Campin may be a more likely identity for the anonymous Bedford Master than the earlier suggested court painter Haincelin de Haguenot, by me considered to be identical with the young Jan van Eyck.

Referring to the style of paintings by Campin’s pupils Rogier van der Weyden and Jacques Daret there has been established consensus, that Campin probably has painted three big panels in Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt am Main: the Virgin and Child, the St Veronica Holding the Vernicle, and the grisaille Trinity, paintings that have been recorded to have come from a so-called Abbey of Flémalle. Ascribed to Campin is also the Crucified Thief with Two Onlookers in the same museum, probably part of a large altarpiece of which a reduced copy is preserved in Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Scholars have, however, not been able to identify the mentioned Abbey of Flémalle, and it has been thought to be non existant. Keeping in mind the great number of misinterpreted old texts I guess that Flémalle is a misreading for a place now called Fléville-devant-Nancy, which has a very old history, partly under the government of the dukes of Lorraine.

Several other works, excellently composed and with figures seemingly drawn from nature with revolutionary exactness, have frequently and with good reasons been discussed as possibly by Campin, e g the Mérode Triptych (Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the Virgin and Child before a Firescreen (National Gallery, London). The skilfully painted faces in the paintings in Städelsches Kunstinstitut have led many scholars to ascribe to Campin also Portrait of a Man and Portrait of a Woman (both in National Gallery, London), and the portrait of the so-called Robert de Masmines (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), since long considered as incunabula in the history of portraiture. These outstanding portraits may, however, have been painted after the death of Campin, and by other artists, as I am trying to show in the article Early Netherlandish Portrait Paintings Reconsidered and in the article Jean Fouquet and Early Portrait Painting.

Hardly none would have hesitated to maintain that both stylistic evidences and common sense make it likely that Campin should be the same artist as the master Hubert we know both from documents and from secondary, although partly incorrect sources about Hubert van Eyck - had there not existed the already mentioned document clearly stating that the estate of a Lubrecht van Heyke in the latter part of 1426 paid a very modest tax in Ghent on the property this man had owned at his death. This Lubrecht is, however, as already mentioned, not said to have been a painter, nor a master, and if he really had been, this at his death poor man cannot - as the legend and many scholars have accepted - have been the same man as the respected master Hubert, who in the same year 1426 was at the height of a career and who it is unreasonable to think could have died without substantial means. The Ghent Lubrecht also died unmarried, which at this time hardly was possible for a master running a workshop with apprentices, as the otherwise documented Hubert did.

The name Van Eyck or Van Heyke was not at all uncommon. F Gorissen has presented documents showing that only in Nijmegen in Guelders there was a great number of persons belonging to such a family or families. If Lubrecht was in a way related to Jan and Hubert, as the name may indicate, this man’s existence may have been one reason for the painter of the Ghent altarpiece to distinguish himself from him by choosing the name Campin, possibly from the territory Campine in the Bishopric of Liège west of the river Maas, bordering the region Limbourg, where the Van Eyck brothers are thought to have been born in a now no longer existing town Maaseik. Hubert was, as M van Vaernewyck wrote in 1568, van nativiteyt uut dat ruydt Kempenlandt (was a native of the rustic Campine). Those who created a partly fictitious biography for Hubert seem to have taken it for granted, that the documented death of a Lubrecht van Heyke in Ghent should refer to Jan van Eyck’s brother. In the sight of a firm date referring to an exceptional artist, about whom so little seemed to be possible to document, most scholars have later accepted the obvious mistake, forgetting common sense. The legends about the great painter Hubert van Eyck have, when repeated enough times, got the character of facts.

The fees for the entrance to the Vijd chapel and the Adoration of the Lamb are on the other hand rather well documented - 14 lists are referred to by E Dhanens - relating to the years from 1529/30 to 1578/79. It seems reasonable to conclude that some such unscrupulous canons, of whom the time was so rich, must have accepted the creation of substantial ´relics´ of the artist who had painted the masterpiece, including not only a supposed death year and date for Hubert but also commemorating texts both on the altarpiece itself and on a brass plate on a gravestone, the latter even placed near the polyptych pretending that the artist should have been buried in the chapel which Jodocus Vijd had erected for himself and his wife.

That the canons were open to rather unconstrained commercial falsifications is strengthened by the fact that there for some years also existed, enclosed in iron, what was claimed to be the artist’s armbone (H van Vaernewyck in 1568). E Dhanens has guessed, that the idea of presenting this armbone may have come up in connection with an opening of the grave, maybe ´on the occasion of the first centenary of the completion of The Adoration of the Lamb´. Supposedly it was in such a connection that it was claimed, that the artist’s sister Margaret should have been buried beside him. What was found was of course the remnants of Jodocus Vijd and his wife, and the finding of bones from a woman had to get an explanation, because it had already been pretended that Hubert had been buried in this chapel, although built and decorated for the Vijd couple shortly before their deaths.

One independent portrait may with some reason be put in connection with Campin, The Man with the Pinks (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). This astonishingly realistic portrait shows a prominent man, who may be an elder member of the house of Holland-Bavaria, most likely Wilhelm VI, suddenly deceased in 1417 after having been bitten by a dog. Quite as the portraits of the Emperors Sigismund and Rudolph - two very early more or less realistic portraits - also this portrait shows a man with his mouth open, which for contemporary viewers meant that the portraits were posthumous and that the soul had left the body through the mouth, as seen in several old illuminations.

A dendrochronological investigation of The Man with the Pinks points to a date after 1468, so if we have to deal with a portrait of Count Wilhelm it must be the question of a later copy. Hardly any other old portrait has so many extremely detailed features, which indicates that the painting has been based on a portrait from the man’s lifetime or from his deathbed. The original may have been commissioned by Wilhelm’s widow Margaret and kept as a memory and a symbol of power. It has often been suggested, that Jan van Eyck may have got commissions from the House of Bavaria already before he in 1422 is first mentioned in The Hague in the service of John III, Count of Holland. As regards Campin, i e Hubert van Eyck, we know for sure, that connections existed to the Bavarian court, which makes him most likely as the painter of the original to this supposed portrait of Wilhelm, who died 52-year-old and was buried in Valenciennes, a city to which Campin had near connections.

Wilhelm’s widow Margaret felt herself so strongly engaged in the life of Campin that she in 1432 intervened in his favour, since the master had been condemned for undecent living with another woman than his wife. This woman’s name was Laurence (Leurence) Polette, a lady who probably was near related to the Agneson Poulette, who in 1418 together with her fiancé was conferred a yearly amount of 65 livres by Jacoba of Bavaria, the only legitimate child of Wilhelm and Margaret. Miss Poulette was the daughter of Jacoba’s wet-nurse and was rewarded for her bien aimée servitresse and for l’affection, que nous avons voulons avoir à elle à cause de ce, que de nostre enfance et jonesse fusmes nourie du lait de sa mère, laquelle chose nous doit induire et mouvoir en son prouffit et avancement.

If the Adoration of the Lamb originally was a commission by Wilhelm VI, his widow may after his death no longer have been in the position to fulfil it, or maybe she did no longer dispose of the place for which it was intended. Designed and with some of the paintings commenced by Campin and assistents, this master may have had the big work waiting in his atelier in Tournai in the hope of a new commissioner. On 23 October 1427, the day of St Luke, Jan van Eyck visited the Guild in Tournai. It is a reasonable guess, that this may have been at the time when it was discussed that the very rich Jodocus Vijd had offered Jan to fulfil the interrupted work on the big altarpiece. Some months later, on 18 March 1428, Jan paid a second visit to Tournai, where his brother was in conflict with the patrician government since the Guild, of which he was one of the leading members, had tried to obtain more democratic rules. In 1429 Campin was sentenced to go on pilgrimage to Provence and to pay a big fine, because he had refused to witness against another member of the Guild. He also lost his civil rights, which maybe made it difficult for him to find a new financier for the altarpiece. In 1432 followed the already mentioned sentence for undecent living with a lady who was not his wife. Such an arrangement may, however, not have been very uncommon among people in his position. It is therefore tempting to try to find a further and more severe reason for the new opposition the master met.

It has been thought that Campin was the one who created the prototype to the type of Annunciations, of which the best known variant is part of the excellent Mérode Triptych in The Cloisters, New York. In this very original Annunciation the scene takes place in a contemporary domestic interior. Most details of this triptych have been the subject of intense discussions, putting them in connection with different religious texts, some of which so unusual that they may have been known by only a very few. There are yet elements that have found little interest, although they obviously are painted with speculative calculation. For the probably first time in an Annunciation we see the Virgin placed before a very dominating fireplace. She is dressed in flamboyant red, the colour of love, passion and fire, and her hair is hanging loose as on an unmarried girl. She has lowered herself from the luxurious bench - perhaps a piece of furniture designed in Campin’s shop - for the meeting of a beautiful young man in the shape of an angel. Only at a very close look it is easy to see, that the Virgin is just pretending to read in the split up book that she holds right before herself. She is instead leering curiously at the young man. The chimney is very blackened from smoke and shows no visible fire, in this way seemingly reminding us of an old and very well-known proverb.

Looked upon in this way, which probably was what many did, this painting is extremely blasphemous and may have deeply insulted important members of the religious establishment, who may have seen it as an infernal threat against one of the religious dogma, that the Church has had especial difficulty in maintaining: the Immaculate Conception. This dogma was in the middle of the 1430s one of the most discussed, e g at the Council of Basel. People who in medieval times felt themselves amused by equivoke jokes may have found it easier than interpreters of our days to discern a hidden meaning also of the single stake with a candle, of which a newly falming light just has expired in a distinct looping smoke. A second split up book may have been seen as referring to a previous occurence, maybe what the angel is trying to remind of, because a little child bearing a cross is on a divine beam directed at the Virgin’s womb, not as the conventional Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove directed at Mary’s head. In a probably contemporary drawing after the central part of this Annunciation (Universitätsbibliothek, Erlangen) the copier seems to show that he is aware of the allusion to the proverb, as he has advanced the height of the chimney and in this way has made the very blackened fireplace an even more dominating part.

The very original painting of St Joseph on the right wing is of the same high quality as the central Annuncation. Sitting in a carpenter’s workshop his tool seems to be less willing when he is trying to bore a hole. It has been interpreted that the mousetraps he has manufactured would have been intended to catch some devil; it is in fact not impossible that Campin had such a thing in mind when he, on the wall opposite the right wing, painted two projecting horn-like lightholders. One ought to have had the imagination of a disappointed and angry master in Tournai with a strong sense for drastic humour to be able to guess what there once may have been painted on an original left wing, now seemingly replaced by a painting of somewhat lower quality.

Disguised erotic themes as representations of Susanne in her bath were often painted in e g Books of Hours, but a blasphemous and heretic painting like the Mérode Annunciation can initially never have hung in an ecclesiastic building in the fifteenth century. It may have been intended for a rather hidden place, maybe owned by some high-ranked private collector, e g Philip the Good, who is known for drastic jokes in his castle in Hesdin. Recent research has observed a close connection between the Mérode Annunciation and the small Virgin and Child before a Firescreen in National Gallery, London, a painting so wonderful in the painting of light that one is bound to see Jan van Eyck as a more probable author than Campin. Campin’s blasphemous original Mérode Annunciation was probably destroyed at first opportunity. The artistic quality of the Annunciation we see today in New York is high enough to guess that it here may be the question of an improved variant painted at a later date by the incomparable master Jan van Eyck.

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