Did Jan van Eyck Invent Oil Painting? The Myth and the Evidence

In 2008 a team of scientists studied the Buddhist cave paintings of Bamiyan, in Afghanistan, behind the giant Buddha statues destroyed in 2001. Using synchrotron light at the ESRF in Grenoble, they found that 12 of the 50 caves had been painted with oil, possibly walnut and poppy-seed oils.³

The murals date from the mid-7th century: hundreds of years before the technique was “invented” in Europe, as the researchers put it.³ Their team leader, Yoko Taniguchi, called it the earliest clear example of oil paintings in the world.³

Britannica puts it simply: he may not have invented painting with oils, but he perfected the technique to mirror the textures, light and space of nature.¹

The National Gallery goes further. There is nothing unusual in the pigments of the Arnolfini Portrait; its illusion of reality relied on Van Eyck's skill, not on any technical innovation. And for a picture that looks so precise, it was painted surprisingly quickly and freely, with small touches of color almost bounced off the panel.²

Above the mirror in the Arnolfini Portrait, Van Eyck painted his signature like graffiti: “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic,” Jan van Eyck was here. The mirror reflects two tiny figures entering the room, one of them probably the painter himself.^{2, 4}

Signing and dating pictures was unusual at the time. Van Eyck did it, and added a personal motto, Als ich kan, “As well as I can.”⁴

Oil paint is pigment suspended in a drying oil, most often linseed. Because it dries slowly, a painter can build a picture gradually and correct it along the way, and oil colors blend into subtle variations.⁵

Van Eyck used those qualities to paint light itself: dull reflections on cloth, shifting highlights on metal and glass.⁴ Almost two centuries later, Rubens was still renewing the early Netherlandish tradition of Van Eyck,⁶ and painters kept pushing oil further, from deep shadows to thick, sculpted paint.