The Arnolfini Portrait has left the National Gallery once in more than a hundred years. Once. It is one of the most studied paintings in the world, and institutions that ask to borrow it are routinely told no. When Van Eyck: The Portraits opens on 21 November 2026, it goes on display beside the Berlin panel thought to show the same sitter, a man whose identity is still contested, in a pairing that has never happened before. That is one fact from a show with several more like it.
Van Eyck: The Portraits runs at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, until 11 April 2027, and it brings together all nine of Jan van Eyck’s painted portraits for the first time. Those nine account for roughly half of the twenty or so paintings firmly attributed to him. Getting them into one building took years of negotiation, and at least one of those loans set a precedent: the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is lending both of its Van Eyck paintings at once, which it has never done before.Both the Portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, around 1431, and the Portrait of Jan de Leeuw, from 1436, travel to London together.
There is more that has not happened before. The newly conserved Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?), 1433, from the Gallery’s own collection, hangs next to Margaret, the Artist’s Wife, 1439, on loan from the Groeningemuseum in Bruges. Margaret is the first known portrait of a woman who was not an aristocrat. Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon, around 1430, comes from the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu, Romania. And from the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden comes a silverpoint and goldpoint drawing on prepared paper, Portrait of an Elderly Man, around 1438, the only drawing by Van Eyck that survives. It will be shown with the painting it inspired for only the second time.
The show also displays several portraits in the round, backs and original frames included. Van Eyck painted those backs to imitate marble and metal, so they were never afterthoughts. Most visitors have never seen them, because most museums hang these panels face-forward against a wall. Showing them in the round changes what the works are, not just how they look.
The exhibition is ticketed, which is unusual for the National Gallery, otherwise free to enter. Prices had not been published at the time of writing, but National Gallery Members go free and had priority booking from 22 September 2026. Public tickets went on sale in September. The catalogue is the first monograph ever published on Van Eyck’s portraits: 208 pages, hardback, by lead curator Emma Capron and Nicholas Flory, £40, or £35 at the Gallery rate. It will outlast the show, which closes on 11 April 2027 with no sign that these loans will ever be assembled again.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/van-eyck-the-portraits
