Kenneth Clark TV - Andrew Graham-Dixon TV - Nicola Hodge & Libby Anson - Waldemar Januszczak TV -
Realistic portraiture ... Jan van Eyck – no-one has looked at the human face with a dispassionate eye and recorded his findings with a more delicate eye. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 4/13: Man the Measure of All Things, BBC 1969
The first evolved landscape in European painting – the background of Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb; the foreground is painted with a medieval sharpness of detail. ibid.
[Jan] Van Eyck did in effect invent oil painting. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The High Art of the Low Countries: Dream of Plenty, BBC 2013
Jan van Eyck was the greatest artist of the early Netherlands school. He held high positions throughout his career, including court painter and diplomat in Bruges. So outstanding was his skill as an oil painter that the invention of the medium was at one time attributed to him, with his brother Hubert, also a painter. Van Eyck exploited the qualities of oil as never before, building up layers of transparent glazes, thus giving him a surface on which to capture objects in the minutest detail and allowing for the preservation of his colours. Nicola Hodge & Libby Anson: The A-Z of Art
It’s Van Eyck’s greatest achievement – the Ghent Altar, a masterpiece of spectacular complexity and mysterious ambition. With so much going on in it. Waldemar Januszczak, The Renaissance Unchained: Gods, Myths and Oil Paints, BBC 2017