Museum and History Society Talk: Art in the 1400's - The Arnolfini Portraits

Wincanton Museum and History Society presents Art in the 1400: The Arnolfini Portraits. A talk by Jonathan Weeks.

Never Heard of the Arnolfini Portraits? Below are some notes. Painted in Bruges by Jan van Eyck this double portrait is one of the earliest in oils and shows stunning accuracy and realism.

Our lecturer is Jonathan Weeks a specialist in early music as well as painting and he will be speaking on Friday 30th September in the Balsam Centre at 7.30pm.

Tickets for non-members are £6. Entrance for members is free. Refreshments will be served. These talks are not to be missed.

Our Lecturer, Jonathan Weeks

A graduate in Archaeology from Reading University in the 1970s, Jonathan specialised in the medieval period and became very interested in the musical instruments of those days not only through survivals but also through the depictions of them in manuscript illustrations and religious iconography. At the same time the musician and presenter David Munrow was re-creating and reintroducing the instruments to the wider public he began collecting and playing the instruments for his own amusement.

After 15 years of working on the family farm in Buckinghamshire Jonathan moved to Somerset with his ever growing collection and began giving talks about them, which proved very popular, and he has now delivered the talk nearly a thousand times. He lives in East Lambrook in Somerset with his medieval and Renaissance works.

Wikipedia says: "The Arnolfini Portrait is an oil painting on an oak panel dated 1434 by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck. This painting is believed to be a portrait of the Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife, presumably in their home in the Flemish city of Bruges. It is considered one of the most original and complex paintings in Western art history.

"Both signed and dated by Van Eyck in 1434, it is, with the Ghent Altarpiece by the same artist and his brother Hubert, the oldest very famous panel painting to have been executed in oils rather than in tempera. The painting was bought by the National Gallery in London in 1842.

"The illusionism of the painting was remarkable for its time, in part for the rendering of detail, but particularly for the use of light to evoke space in an interior, for its utterly convincing depiction of a room, as well of the people who inhabit it."

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