The Transept of the Mariakerk in Utrecht, Seen from the Northeast

Entry

Saenredam was in Utrecht from June to October 1636, where he made a series of drawings of seven churches: the Mariakerk, the Buurkerk, the St Jacobskerk, the St Pieterskerk, the cathedral, the St Janskerk, and finally the St Catharinakerk.³ He was still using those sketches in the 1660s. The earliest dated paintings of Utrecht churches are the present work and one from the same year in Kassel,⁴ both of them interiors of the Mariakerk. Saenredam made no fewer than twelve paintings of this church, of which the Rijksmuseum has three.⁵

The composition is based on a preliminary study on paper dated 22 July 1636 that is now in Berlin (fig. a),⁶ although it also contains a few details from a drawing in Rotterdam, dated 7 July 1636 (fig. b).⁷ No construction drawing is known to have survived. The interior, which follows the drawing faithfully in its close attention to the flaking plaster and the damp-stains on the vaults and the walls, is considerably more austere in the painting than in the preliminary study. The most noticeable omissions are the choir screen of 1543, which was designed by Jan van Scorel, and the imitation tapestry on the central pier and on the arch of the south aisle (cf. SK-A-851). The hatchment and inscription on the right-hand pier have also been eliminated. In addition, the wooden draught screen in the south wall of the transept has been reduced to a side wall and an open door.⁸

Technical examination has revealed that it was only in a late stage that Saenredam decided to do away with most of these details.⁹ The choir screen is still present in the underdrawing on the panel, and the draught screen is articulated in full. Part of the choir screen was actually painted in, as were the imitation tapestries, which had already been executed in gold leaf and red before the artist overpainted them.¹⁰ Remarkably, the same process of elimination was applied to the above-mentioned interior of the same church in Kassel, which dates from the same year.¹¹ Ruurs suggested that the paintings were made for the open market and that the tapestries may have been overpainted at the request of a Protestant purchaser.¹²

It is not always clear whether the staffage in Saenredam’s church interiors is autograph, and here there is even some doubt about the figures in the background. Those in the foreground were quite clearly added by another hand.¹³ Ger Luijten recognized them as being the inventions of the French etcher Jacques Callot.¹⁴ Some of these figures do indeed prove to be literal or only slightly modified borrowings from series of costumes and beggars by Callot.¹⁵

Swillens’s remark that, like the following painting, this one came from the house of Constantijn Huygens, Stadholder Frederik Hendrik’s private secretary,¹⁶ has been repeated by other authors.¹⁷ However, Helmus has shown convincingly that this hypothesis is not backed by the facts.¹⁸ That supposed provenance was probably due to confusion with the painting The Nave and Choir of the Mariakerk in Utrecht, Seen from the West (29 January 1641) (SK-A-851).

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 259.