Porträt eines Mönchs

This small panel comes from the very end of Jan van Eyck's life, around 1441, the year he died in Bruges. He was the painter who pushed oil paint further than anyone before him, using it to give a single face a startling, sober exactness, and quiet portraits of unnamed sitters were part of what he did between the great commissions. Whether his own hand held the brush here is not settled. Some give the panel to van Eyck himself, others to a follower trained in his workshop, and it has at times been catalogued simply as school of van Eyck. The sitter, a monk, is no one we can now name. It hangs today in Montauban, in the museum built around the collection of the painter Ingres, the town's most famous son.