The Mystery of the missing panel.The Mystery of the missing panel.

Hubert van Eyck died in 1426, leaving the altarpiece unfinished. This engraving was made in 1610, long after his death. It imagines his appearance; no confirmed likeness survives.

No other surviving painting is securely attributed to Hubert. That absence led some scholars to question whether the verse crediting him had been added later.

The frame offered an answer to the question of who painted what. A four-line verse, called the quatrain, names Hubert as the artist who began the work and Jan as the one who finished it. This old University of Louvain glass slide records that inscription.

Scholars once questioned whether the inscription was authentic. Restoration confirmed that it was original.

The frame’s account remained disputed until researchers could look beneath the finished painting. Between 2012 and 2020, a team led by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, KIK-IRPA, studied and restored panels at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent. Infrared images and X-ray scans revealed drawings and earlier layers of paint.

On the lower panels, restored between 2016 and 2019, the team found an earlier version attributed to Hubert. He had already painted the sky, hills, distant cities, and a meadow. The altar, lamb, angels, and some central figures were there too, with a spring running through the grass in front.

Jan built on that work after Hubert’s death. He changed the landscape, added more figures, and developed the scene we see today. The team also confirmed that the frame’s inscription was original, supporting its account of the two brothers.

The evidence was there all along, beneath the paint.

In the sixteenth century, the lamb’s head was painted over with a softer, more familiar animal face. Restoration revealed the original beneath it, with forward-facing eyes and an almost human mouth.

The changes were not limited to the face. Researchers found three versions of the lamb’s body: an early version attributed to Hubert, a revision, and paint added later.

For roughly four hundred years, visitors had seen a different face from the one the van Eycks left. The image on the left shows it before restoration; the image on the right shows the uncovered original.

The next separation came through a sale. In 1816, a cathedral canon sold the outer wings to a dealer. They eventually reached Berlin. Germany now held the wings, while Belgium kept the centre.

During the First World War, Canon Gabriel van den Gheyn helped hide the Ghent panels inside the walls of private houses. He showed the occupying army a letter claiming the painting had been sent to England.

In 1920, the Treaty of Versailles required the Berlin panels to be returned. For the first time in a century, the separated sections were reunited.

Hitler resented that requirement. He wanted the altarpiece for the Führermuseum he planned in Linz, where he had grown up. Hermann Göring wanted it too. Both regarded its return to Belgium as something to reverse.

Belgian officials tried to send the altarpiece to the Vatican in 1940, but it remained in Pau, in unoccupied France.

German forces seized the painting in 1942 and took it to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. From there, it was moved to the salt mine at Altaussee in Austria.

Workers move the central panel at Altaussee in 1945. The altarpiece became the first artwork returned through the Munich collecting point.

It left by air for Brussels on 21 August, but a storm forced the plane to divert. The next day, it was received at the Royal Palace.

The wartime recovery brought the surviving panels home. It could not restore the Just Judges, which had disappeared before the war. To understand that loss, we need to go back to 1934.

The theft happened overnight, between 10 and 11 April 1934. Someone forced the lock of the Vijd Chapel and removed two pictures. Originally, they had been painted on opposite sides of one oak board. In 1894, the board had been sawn apart so visitors could see both pictures at once.

One showed Saint John the Baptist in shades of grey. The other, the Just Judges, showed riders on horseback in the lower left of the open altarpiece. Some have long been thought to represent the van Eyck brothers.

A French note left on the empty frame read: “Taken from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.”

The Belgian government took over negotiations, arguing that the diocese could not decide the ransom of a national treasure. To prove possession, the person sending the letters directed police to a station luggage locker. Inside was the Saint John the Baptist panel.

Accounts differ on whether the locker was in Brussels-North or Ghent. The Just Judges was not there, and negotiations failed.

About thirteen letters survive as carbon copies. One final letter was never sent. Those papers would become the link between the ransom demands and a man in nearby Wetteren.

On 25 November 1934, Arsène Goedertier, a stockbroker from nearby Wetteren with connections to cathedral circles, suffered a heart attack. He called his lawyer, Georges de Vos, to his bedside.

Goedertier said he alone knew where the missing panel was. He told de Vos to look in the right-hand drawer of his writing desk for an envelope marked “mutualité.” Before he could explain the location, he died.

The desk contained copies of the ransom letters and the unsent final letter. That last letter described a place where removing the panel would attract public attention, but it gave no clear address. The photograph shows Goedertier during his life; none was taken at the bedside.

De Vos waited about a month before telling police about the letters. Once investigators examined them, they concluded that Goedertier was responsible for the theft. They also suspected he had help from someone inside the cathedral. Neither conclusion led them to the painting, and the formal investigation wound down in 1937.

Another lead came from an unlikely witness: a man who said he had been out stealing cheese. He recalled seeing two men carrying a covered panel near the cathedral at about one in the morning. In 1947, he identified one as the smuggler Polydor Priem. The second man’s identity was never securely established, and any police record naming him has been lost.

While the original remained missing, restorer Jef Van der Veken painted a replacement during the war. It was installed around 1950. He included likenesses of himself and King Leopold III, and wrote a verse about the theft on the back.

Some wondered whether he had painted over the stolen original and returned it in disguise. Technical examination ruled that out. The replacement is a separate painting.

Sint-Gertrudiskerk, the parish church in Goedertier’s hometown, has also drawn attention in the search.

In 2012, a BBC documentary team accompanied Ghent police to a church in Wetteren. A participant later described an outline in the dust behind the church’s rood screen, a partition near the altar. It matched the missing panel’s shape and size, but did not prove that the Just Judges had been there.

It fits one reading of the final letter: a hiding place in a public building. It remains a lead, not an answer.

In 2008, a tip sent investigators to Sint-Jansvest in Ghent. The claim placed the panel in a zinc case inside a well. Police opened part of an underground car park, but found nothing.

The panel remains listed as missing by the Monuments Men and Women Foundation. No sighting since the theft has been confirmed.

With no confirmed sighting, the explanations remain theories. Goedertier may have acted alone, hidden the panel, and died before he could secure the ransom.

Another is that he handled the letters for someone inside the cathedral who knew the chapel.

The note about Versailles may have been intended to mislead investigators. Whether it concealed a different motive remains uncertain.

Another possibility is that the panel was destroyed after negotiations failed. In that case, Goedertier’s deathbed claim would not have led to a surviving painting.

Or it may still be hidden in a public place, as the unsent letter suggests. After decades of searches, no theory has produced the panel.