The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam

Entry

Saenredam painted relatively few exteriors.⁷ In other respects, too, this portrait of the old town hall done in light tints is exceptional in his oeuvre. It is the only painting with an Amsterdam subject, and one of the few works to feature a building other than a church.⁸

The subject of this painting is the old town hall on Dam Square.⁹ The original building was probably largely or totally rebuilt after a fire in 1452. The square structure just to the left of centre is the tribunal, where justice was administered.¹⁰ Just visible above the wooden railings under the arcade are the feet of four wooden statues of counts of Holland that crowned the fencing.¹¹ The three-storey building on the right housed the Exchange Bank, the Orphans’ Chamber, the Insurance Chamber, and other offices. The Burgomasters’ Chamber was on the ground floor beneath the square tower. The street on the left is Gasthuissteeg with St Elizabeth’s Hospital, which was added to the town hall complex in 1492. The latter went up in flames on 7 July 1652, when work on the new town hall (now the Royal Palace) behind the old building was in full swing.

There is no known construction drawing.¹² As the artist states in the inscription on the step in the centre, the Rijksmuseum painting is based on a drawing of 1641 in pen and watercolour.¹³ That sheet is characteristic of Saenredam’s meticulousness and diligence. He worked on it for no fewer than six days, from 15 to 20 July 1641, ‘being assiduously occupied with it from morning till evening’, as he himself noted on a sketch after the drawing (fig. a).¹⁴ He gave the correct date on which the building burned down (7 July 1652) on both his ‘neat drawing’ and the drawn copy,¹⁵ so it is strange that someone who was otherwise so precise should give the year as 1651 on this painting.

In 1641, when Saenredam made his drawing, the medieval town hall was in a very dilapidated state. Plans for a new building were already being prepared, and since Saenredam’s friend Jacob van Campen was commissioned to design it, the Haarlem artist must have known about the building plans. It is possible that he wanted to document the old building before it lost its function as the town hall.¹⁶ Whether he was already planning to make a painting for the new town hall, as suggested by Schwartz and Bok,¹⁷ is very open to question, given the long interval between the drawing and the painting. It was not until 1657, 16 years after completion of the drawing, that Saenredam used the sheet for a painting. On 30 July 1658 he sold it to the burgomasters of Amsterdam for 400 guilders. It was agreed that it would hang in the Burgomasters’ Chamber in the new town hall.¹⁸ It was later given a companion piece in the form of a 1667 view of the new town hall by Jacob van der Ulft.¹⁹

Saenredam’s portrait of the old town hall was famed among his contemporaries, and was praised by countless writers of his day and later, among them Arnold Houbraken.²⁰ Various prints, drawings and painted copies were made after it.²¹ The ebony frame recorded as being around Saenredam’s portrait of the old town hall in an 18th-century description, is now lost, but the painting was recently given a new profiled black frame.²²

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. 263.