Friday, November 19, 2021

Sacred Interiors by Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painters

Gerard Houckgeest
Interior of the Oude Kerk at Delft
1654
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Cornelis de Man
Interior of the Oude Kerk at Delft
ca. 1660-70
oil on canvas
private collection

Hendrik Cornelisz van Vliet
Interior of the Oude Kerk at Delft
1661
oil on canvas
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Emanuel de Witte
Interior of the Oude Kerk at Delft
1651
oil on panel
Wallace Collection, London

Hendrik Cornelisz van Vliet
Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk at Delft
with the Tomb of William the Silent
and a freshly-dug Grave

ca. 1650-60
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Hendrik Cornelisz van Vliet
Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk at Delft
with the Tomb of William the Silent
and a freshly-dug Grave

1667
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Cornelis de Man
Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk at Delft
with the Tomb of William the Silent
and a freshly-dug Grave

ca. 1660-70
oil on canvas
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

Gerard Houckgeest
Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk at Delft
with the Tomb of William the Silent

1651
oil on panel
Mauritshuis, The Hague

Gerard Houckgeest
Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk at Delft
with the Tomb of William the Silent

1651
oil on panel
Mauritshuis, The Hague

Hendrik Cornelisz van Vliet
Interior of a Church
with a freshly-dug Grave

before 1675
oil on canvas
private collection

Bartholomeus van Bassen
Interior of St Cunerakerk at Rhenen
1638
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Pieter Saenredam
Interior of the Janskerk at Utrecht
ca. 1650
oil on panel
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Pieter Saenredam
Interior of the Sint Laurenskerk at Alkmaar
1661
oil on panel
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Pieter Saenredam
Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem
1636-37
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Gesina ter Borch
Young Woman standing with Death
at a freshly dug grave in St Michael's Church

ca. 1671
watercolor
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"In her important new book [The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014], Angela Vanhaelen argues that seventeenth-century Dutch church interior paintings address a particular moment in history – one of transition – in which the Dutch attempted to resolve the tension between their former and current religious affiliations through various means of repressing, repudiating, or reconciling with the past.   She treats images by Pieter Saenredam, Emanuel de Witte, and others depicting formerly Catholic churches recently co-opted for Calvinist worship as meta-works of art that both confront and critique the Catholic history of their subjects and interrogate Dutch Calvinist identity.  By assessing these images in light of the multi-confessional religious climate of the Dutch Republic, she establishes the seemingly self-evident but remarkably underappreciated idea that, as representations of church interiors, these paintings concern religion.  . . .  For Vanhaelen, however, church interior paintings are, in a sense, palimpsests: they employ the opacity of paint to establish a material present that denies a spiritual past in a manner analogous to the whitewashed walls of the physical churches."

– Sara Bordeaux, from a review published online in Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews