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Jan van Eyck worked for one of the richest men in 15th-century Europe, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, whose lands stretched across what is now Belgium, Holland, and eastern France. Van Eyck was his court painter and valet de chambre, paid a generous salary and trusted well beyond the studio. In 1428 the duke sent him south to Portugal on a marriage embassy, and part of his job there was to paint the bride, Isabella, so Philip could see the woman he was arranging to marry.

Back in Bruges he was perfecting something that made his pictures look lit from within. He did not invent oil paint, but he learned to build an image from many thin, transparent glazes, layer over layer, so light seemed to sink into the colour and glow back out. It let him render a brass chandelier, a convex mirror, and the deep pile of a fur trim with a sharpness no painter had reached before, most famously in the Arnolfini double portrait of 1434.

His largest surviving work is the Ghent Altarpiece, finished in 1432, a great folding set of panels begun by his brother Hubert. Its frame carries an inscription naming Jan as the one who completed it, and on the Arnolfini portrait he signed the wall itself in looping Latin script, reading Jan van Eyck was here, above the date he made it.