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The Limburger Charles Hubert Eyck became famous as a painter, illustrator, sculptor, stained glass artist and ceramist and made many monumental wall paintings. When he became deaf after an illness at the age of 10, he had to leave school. He was already drawing at a young age and his parents sent him to the Maastricht earthenware factory Ceramique where he decorated cups and saucers and thus contributed to the family's income. In the evenings he took drawing lessons with the pottery painter Jos Tilmans and at the age of twenty-one he went to the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. During this period he was strongly influenced by A. Derkinderen, known for his monumental wall and glass paintings.
When he won the Prix de Rome in 1922, he went on a study trip to Italy. There he met the Swedish painter Karin Meyer, whom he married in 1924. They traveled on to the South of France, where they would stay for 4 years. Eyck developed a very personal, slightly romantic expressionist style in which the influences of the work of Picasso and Matisse that he had seen in France and that of the CoBrA painters in the Netherlands can be seen. At the end of the 1920s, Eyck returned to the Netherlands to settle in Schimmert in South Limburg. In those years, a group of progressive Catholic writers, journalists, architects, filmmakers and artists had formed there who wanted to break open the oppressive provincialism in the Limburg art world with the call for more freedom and openness. This group of artists, of which Henri Jonas, Joep Nicolas, Otto van Rees and Charles Eyck were the most important representatives, became known as the Limburg School and flourished in the period 1818-1940. The Catholic Church was the binding social factor and also, in addition to the business community, proved to be a major client for stained glass, reliefs, sculptures and paintings in churches and buildings.
In 1938, when Eyck was becoming increasingly well-known, he designed his own house ‘Ravensbos’ between Valkenburg and Schimmert, where he would live until the end of his life. Due to his deafness, he led a fairly withdrawn life. He reads a lot and writes letters to everyone he wants to exchange ideas with. He refuses to become a member of the Kultuurkamer during the Second World War and during that time he shelters colleagues who have to go into hiding. After the war he works a lot in the many damaged churches and receives commissions for resistance monuments.
After a year's stay in Curaçao (1952-1953), Eyck's narrative baroque style changes to a more romantic expressionist one. Eyck ignores the abstract art that presents itself after the Second World War - he continues with figurative work. He is looking for new forms of expression and finds them in a very personal, slightly romantic expressionist style. Influences can be seen in this from the lines that Picasso uses in his work, the use of color of the CoBrA painters and the simple visual language of the expressionists.
In 1955 he is a professor at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht for a short time. Due to disagreements with the director he resigns after a year. During that time Eyck also resists the emerging new art movements and makes several foreign trips to Spain, Greece and the Netherlands Antilles to gain inspiration. Eyck was a versatile artist with an unprecedented high production. His mission was to be of service to society, a community artist.
