Jan van Eyck

Jan van Eyck was a Flemish painter, born near Maaseik in present-day Belgium, and one of the founding masters of early Netherlandish painting. He pioneered a technique of applying oil paint in thin, translucent glazes that gave his panels an unprecedented depth of color and tone, achieving a meticulous naturalism that broke decisively from the International Gothic style still dominant elsewhere in Europe. His major works, including the Ghent Altarpiece, completed with his brother Hubert, and the Arnolfini Portrait, are dense with symbolic detail and precise observation, and he was the only major fifteenth-century Netherlandish painter to consistently sign his work, often with the personal motto Als Ich Kan, a pun on his own name.