Divine Provenance at the Met

by David Moore

On November 4, 1933, a front-page, above-the-fold New York Times story announced that the Metropolitan Museum of Art would open an exhibition, that very day, of “a small diptych” that had recently been sold by the Soviet government. These were, museum director Herbert E. Winlock suggested silkily, perhaps the most important paintings the museum had ever bought with its own money: The Crucifixion and The Last Judgment, painted by Hubert van Eyck in “the early years of the fifteenth century.” Each of the paintings was just 22 3/4 inches tall by 7 1/4 inches wide, and so rich in detail that the museum supplied “a small [magnifying] glass on a chain” so that visitors might appreciate the work “to its fullest extent.”  

The Times noted that the paintings had long been attributed to Hubert van Eyck’s younger brother, Jan; that the Met had decided otherwise; and that controversy over the attribution was not yet at an end. Hubert, about whom little is known to this day, was the older of the two brothers; he died in 1426. A wave of excitement around his life and career began in earnest in 1823, with the discovery that it had been Hubert who began painting the timeless Ghent Altarpiece, a mind-boggling work that’s been called the most stolen artwork of all time: beneath an over-painting, a Latin quatrain was found that read, in one translation, “The painter Hubert van Eyck, a greater man than whom cannot be found, began this work. Jan, his brother, second in art, completed the weighty task at the request of Joos Vijd. He invites you with this verse, on the sixth of May [1432], to look at what has been done.” The brothers’ overlapping handiwork on the Ghent Altarpiece has prompted tantalizing research into the areas each may have painted.