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Man in a Blue Turban

Jan van Eyck

Man in a Blue Turban

Jan van Eyck
  • Date: 1430 - 1433
  • Style: Northern Renaissance
  • Genre: portrait
  • Media: oil, wood
  • Dimensions: 16.6 x 22.5 cm
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Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon (or Portrait of a Man with a Blue Hood, earlier Portrait of a Jeweler or Man with a Ring) is a very small (22.5 cm x 16.6 cm with frame) oil on panel portrait of an unidentified man attributed to the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck.

The painting was commissioned and completed sometime around 1430. It contains a number of elements typical of van Eyck's secular portraits, including a slightly oversized head, a dark and flat background, forensic attention to the small details and textures of the man's face, and illusionistic devices. Artists did not give titles to their works during the Northern Renaissance period, and as with any portrait of a sitter whose identity is lost, the painting has attracted generic titles over the years. It had long been thought that the ring held in the man's right hand was meant as an indication of his profession as a jeweler or goldsmith and so the painting was long titled on variants of such. More recently the ring is interpreted as an emblem of betrothal and the titles given by various art historians and publications since are usually more descriptive of the colour or form of the headdress.

The painting was attributed to van Eyck in the late 19th century, but this was repeatedly challenged by some art historians until a 1991 cleaning when infra-red photography revealed an underdrawing and methods of handling of oil that were unmistakably van Eyck's.

Prior to 1948, the panel belonged to the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu, Romania. That year, the new Communist regime seized the panel, along with eighteen others it considered the museum's most valuable holdings, and gave it to the National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest. At the end of 2006, in time for Sibiu's stint as European Capital of Culture, the works were returned to the Brukenthal Museum.

The man is shown in three-quarters view with his face dramatically lit by light falling from the left. This device provides both striking contrasts of light and shadow and draws the viewer's attention on to the man's face. He has brown eyes, and while his expression is impassive there are traces of melancholy, especially in the down-turn of his mouth. He is obviously a member of the nobility, being very well dressed in a fur lined brown jacket over a black undervest. His headdress, a chaperon, contains two wings which hang down over the man's shoulders and extend to his chest. The edges of the cloth are given a shredded look at the edges of their trains. The hood is brightly and dramatically coloured using pigment extracted from the expensive lapis lazuli gemstone to give it its bright, intense hue. The headdress is of a similar but less extravagant type to that seen in van Eyck's c. 1433 Portrait of a Man, and worn by a figure in the distance in his c. 1435 Madonna of Chancellor Rolin. This type of headdress was to go out of fashion by the mid 1430s, conveniently and definitively dating the painting as having been completed before then.

This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). The full text of the article is here →


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The painting came into the collection of Samuel von Brukenthal (1721-1803), Habsburg governor of Transylvania from 1774 to 1787. Along with the rest of his collection at his Baroque house, Brukenthal Palace in Hermannstadt (Sibiu), it became part of a public collection that opened in 1817. Until 1948, the panel belonged to the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu, Romania. That year, the new Communist regime seized the panel, along with eighteen others it considered the museum's most valuable holdings, and gave it to the National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest. At the end of 2006, in time for Sibiu's stint as European Capital of Culture, the works were returned to the Brukenthal Museum.

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