Estudio para el cardenal Niccolò Albergati

This small silverpoint drawing is one of only a handful of works on paper that survive from Jan van Eyck, the most celebrated painter in northern Europe in the 1430s and court artist to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. It was drawn from life. Niccolò Albergati, an Italian cardinal travelling as a papal peace envoy between France and Burgundy, sat before him, and van Eyck caught the tired, heavy-lidded face of an ageing diplomat in fine metal lines. Because he could not keep the sitter long, he wrote colour notes in the margins in his own hand, the grey of the stubble, the reddish tones of the skin, so he could work up the finished oil portrait later in his workshop. That painted version now hangs in Vienna. The silverpoint is so fragile it is almost never shown.