Don’t compare your friends, children or exes, because once you start totting up the fors and againsts, someone’s going to lose. The National Gallery has insisted on comparing artists – sorry, putting their work ‘in conversation’ – in their big paid exhibitions for years now, and it has rarely worked out well. Because when you put someone like Jan van Eyck next to the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and start drawing parallels, one of them is always going to come out looking really bad, and let me tell ya, it’s not old van Eyck.
The premise here is that van Eyck’s seminal ‘Arnolfini Portrait’ – a genuine masterpiece of Flemish art – played a pivotal role in the development of the Pre-Raphaelites, or at the very least had a profound influence on them. Van Eyck was a master of detail, a virtuoso of the everyday who created mesmerising images of life in the lowlands. The Pre-Raphs – founded by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti – were foppish dandies who broke with the past by looking further into it and creating a body of romantic, Technicolour, poetic imagery.
Try not to get your adult nappies in a twist, but here’s a little bit of truth milk to pour over your cereal: the Pre-Raphaelites really aren't that great. Their art is backwards-looking, overblown and often very, very pompous. And next to van Eyck, they look even worse. Look, I can hack a show of Pre-Raph art, I can see the intentions and the beauty in some of the work, but I can’t do that when forced to draw parallels with a better artist, especially when the art historical basis for this is shaky at best. It’s all too tenuous. Even if you like Rossetti or the later Sidney Meteyard, you can see that hanging these artists next to van Eyck doesn’t do either of them any favours.
And worst of all, you can see the ‘Arnolfini Portrait’ for free most of the time as part of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. The show’s not just weak, but it’s a bit of a bloody swizz to boot.
@eddyfrankel