Untitled [After Jan van Eyck]

This drawing reveals Barton’s process of visual distillation. On the left side of a folded sheet, he copied a famous fifteenth-century portrait by the Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, using rudimentary hatching and cross-hatching to model the figure. Barton fumbled the proportions, drawing the nose twice. By contrast, a pure contour drawing of the same subject—likely Van Eyck himself—on the right side of the sheet is far more confidently executed. Despite his economy of line, Barton conveyed the sitter’s intense gaze in a sketch so fluid it seems to have made itself, beginning at the collar and trailing off the page’s right edge.