Jan Carel van Eyck

The Fall of Phaethon has carried his name for a long time, and the attribution has grown shaky. The canvas belongs to the Torre de la Parada series, the mythological decoration Philip IV of Spain ordered from Rubens's Antwerp workshop for a hunting lodge near Madrid in the late 1630s. Jan Carel van Eyck was born in Antwerp in 1649, about a decade after those pictures were delivered. The Netherlands Institute for Art History now files the painting under an anonymous hand, while the old label has stayed attached to it.

The painter himself is documented, thinly. His father Nicolaas van Eyck was a painter too, and the surname was a common one in Antwerp with no shown link to the Van Eycks of the fifteenth century. He registered in 1669 as a pupil of the history painter Jan Erasmus Quellinus, and he made village landscapes and winter scenes with frozen rivers, horses and sledges. In 1677 he is recorded in Rome, and one signed winter landscape carries the word Roma. He seems never to have gone home to Antwerp. Paintings dated 1686 are the last trace of him, and where he died has never been settled.