Interior of the Oude Kerk in Delft, with the Tomb of Vice-Admiral Pieter Pietersz Heijn

c. 1650

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 68.3 cm × width 56.8 cm
outer size: depth 8.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been removed.
Preparatory layers The single, off-white ground extends up to the current edges of the support. It is quite thick and contains white and some earth pigments.
Underdrawing An underdrawing in a dry medium could be detected with the naked eye and infrared photography, consisting of perspective lines to position the architecture.
Paint layers Due to the poor condition it is difficult to assess the build-up of the painting. The paint extends up to the current edges of the support. The composition was basically built up from the back to the front in what appear to be just one or two thin layers, mostly applied wet in wet. The figures and details were added on top of the dry background and were quite delicately executed with fine brushstrokes. The hatchment on the column on the left has a sponge-like look, possibly the result of tipping a wide brush in the wet paint. The paint surface is smooth throughout.
Erika Smeenk-Metz, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 3 June 1998
infrared photography: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, 4 August 2008
paint samples: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, nos. SK-A-1971/1-2, 4 August 2008
technical report: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, 4 August 2008

Condition

Poor. The paint surface is heavily abraded throughout and many areas of paint loss are covered by old, discoloured retouchings, especially in the light parts of the architecture. Most of the black lines in the vault have been retouched. The same black seems to have been used to touch up some of the figures. The paint was slightly flattened during lining and the canvas weave is visible. The thick, pigmented and discoloured varnish has yellowed significantly and no longer saturates well in some areas.

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1902: canvas lined

Provenance

…; sale, H.I.A. Raedt van Oldenbarnevelt et al. [section Mme Vve J.D. Hoekwater, Delft, et al.], Amsterdam (F. Muller), 15 April 1902 sqq., no. 200, as Hendrick van Vliet (‘Interieur d’église’), or no. 201, as Hendrick van Vliet (‘Interieur d’église’), fl. 690, to the museum

Object number: SK-A-1971

The artist

Gerard Houckgeest (? The Hague c. 1600 - Bergen op Zoom 1661)

Gerard Houckgeest, whose name only surfaced for the first time in nineteenth-century reference books, was probably born in The Hague, as the son of a cloth merchant. His date of birth is always given as around 1600 in the recent literature, but that is no more than a rough estimate based on the assumption that he would have been about 25 years old when he registered with the Hague Guild of St Luke in 1625. In the nineteenth century he was confused with his uncle, the portraitist Joachim Houckgeest. The name of his teacher is not known, but his stylistic development points towards the Hague architectural painter Bartholomeus van Bassen. His earliest known dated picture, Banquet with Charles I and Henrietta Maria of 1635,¹ is a copy after Van Bassen in which only the figures were altered, and his only etching is of a church interior after the same artist.

Houckgeest is recorded as a resident of The Hague in 1633 but he must have left for Delft soon afterwards, for he drew up a prenuptial contract there with Helena van Cromstrijen on 17 March 1635. Although he was still living in Delft and had himself registered as a master painter in that city in 1639, he rejoined the Hague guild that same year. His enrolment may have had something to do with a commission he received in 1640 to draw the cartoons for a tapestry series for the debating chamber of the States-General. A trip to England is suspected on the evidence of an entry in the inventory of Charles I of ‘a Prospective peece painted by Hookgest and the Queenes picture therein at length don by Cornelius Johnson’, and the early sale of four works by Houckgeest from the king’s collection suggests that he was in touch with the English royal house, but there is no firm evidence of a foreign visit.

Houckgeest is registered several times in Delft in the first half of the 1640s, and it seems from the name of his home, Brouwery de Clauw (The Claw Brewery), that he may have run a brewery there. He sold the place in Delft in 1649, and on 27 May 1651 he is recorded as a resident of Steenbergen in the southern province of North Brabant. From 1653 he settled in Bergen op Zoom, where he owned houses and land. He signed a document in The Hague on 15 May 1654. Inheritances, above all from his wife’s family, left him well-off at the end of his life. He died in Bergen op Zoom in August 1661.

Houckgeest, who specialized in painting architecture, left a small oeuvre. At first he depicted imaginary buildings, but from 1650 he portrayed real churches. His last dated paintings are two views of the Sint-Gertrudiskerk in Bergen op Zoom from 1655² and 1656.³

Gerdien Wuestman, 2022

References
R. van Eynden and A. van der Willigen, Geschiedenis der vaderlandsche schilderkunst, sedert de helft der XVIII eeuw, I, Haarlem 1816, pp. 66-67; J. Immerzeel Jr, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters: Van het begin der vijftiende eeuw tot heden, II, Amsterdam 1843, p. 43; C. Kramm, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters: Van den vroegsten tot op onzen tijd, II, Amsterdam 1858, p. 699; F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], I, Rotterdam 1877-78, pp. 6, 33, 45; Bredius in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], IV, Rotterdam 1881-82, p. 8; A. Bredius, ‘De Haagsche schilders Joachim en Gerard Houckgeest’, Oud Holland 6 (1888), pp. 81-86; Wichman in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XVII, Leipzig 1924, pp. 557-58; H. Gerson, Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Haarlem 1942, p. 394; O. Millar (ed.), ‘Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue of the Collections of Charles I’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 37 (1958-60), pp. 1-256, esp. p. 158; O. Millar, ‘The Inventories and Valuations of the King’s Goods, 1649-1651’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 43 (1970-72), pp. 1-458, esp. pp. 188, 191, 277, 300; L. de Vries, ‘Gerard Houckgeest’, Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen 20 (1975), pp. 25-56; W. Liedtke, Architectural Painting in Delft: Gerard Houckgeest, Hendrick van Vliet, Emanuel de Witte, Doornspijk 1982, pp. 29-31; Giltaij in J. Giltaij and G. Jansen (eds.), Perspectiven: Saenredam en de architectuurschilders van de 17e eeuw, exh. cat. Rotterdam (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen) 1991, p. 163; Schavemaker in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, LXXV, Munich/Leipzig 2012, p. 83; A. Pollmer-Schmidt, Kirchenbilder: Der Kirchenraum in der holländischen Malerei um 1650, Kromsdorf 2017; Bredius notes, RKD

Entry

This is a view of the interior of the Oude Kerk in Delft seen from St George’s Chapel, with the tomb of Vice-Admiral Pieter Pietersz Heijn (1577-1629) – popularly known as Piet Hein – in the left background surmounted by the Spanish flags he captured. This marble monument, which is attributed to Pieter de Keyser, was completed in 1638, nine years after the naval hero’s death.⁴ A mason is making an inscription to the left of the central column,⁵ while to the right of it a gravedigger is talking to a man dressed in black.⁶

The composition is related to the church interiors made by the trio of Gerard Houckgeest, Emanuel de Witte and Hendrick van Vliet in the early 1650s. The painting is not signed or dated.⁷ The work was auctioned as a Van Vliet in 1902,⁸ but eight years later Jantzen gave it to Houckgeest on the evidence of a signed picture of 1650 in Hamburg.⁹ The museum initially accepted that attribution,¹⁰ but reverted to Van Vliet in 1934.¹¹ Wheelock and Liedtke have defended the assignment to Houckgeest since the 1970s.¹²

Assessment of this Interior of the Oude Kerk in Delft is complicated a little by its poor condition,¹³ but the similarities to Houckgeest’s work are clear enough for it to be attributed to him. In addition to the resemblance to the signed 1650 Hamburg painting, it displays the stylistic features familiar from the artist’s remaining oeuvre, such as the close attention to the fall of light and shaded passages, and the care lavished on the capitals and other architectural details.¹⁴ The fairly accurate depiction of the construction also points towards Houckgeest, whose church interiors are more faithful to reality than Van Vliet’s.¹⁵ The canvas is dated around 1650 on the basis of its similarity with the painting in Hamburg,¹⁶ which not only makes it one of the earliest of Houckgeest’s realistic church scenes but also the earliest view of Pieter Pietersz Heijn’s tomb.¹⁷

Brussels has a second version of the Amsterdam painting.¹⁸ That work, which is widely regarded as a copy of the one in the Rijksmuseum, is attributed to various artists in the literature.¹⁹

Gerdien Wuestman, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

H. Jantzen, Das niederländische Architekturbild, Leipzig 1910, pp. 97-98, 163, no. 184; T.T. Blade, ‘Two Interior Views of the Old Church in Delft’, Museum Studies 6 (1971), pp. 34-50, esp. p. 48, note 5 (as Hendrick van Vliet); A.K. Wheelock Jr, ‘Gerard Houckgeest and Emanuel de Witte: Architectural Painting in Delft around 1650’, Simiolus 8 (1975-76), pp. 167-85, esp. pp. 181-82; W. Liedtke, Architectural Painting in Delft: Gerard Houckgeest, Hendrick van Vliet, Emanuel de Witte, Doornspijk 1982, pp. 35, 40-41, 42, 99, no. 1; A. Pollmer-Schmidt, Kirchenbilder: Der Kirchenraum in der holländischen Malerei um 1650, Kromsdorf 2017, pp. 134, 309, 312, 319, 326, 455

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 286, no. 2567 (as Hendrick van Vliet); 1934, p. 137, no. 1260a (under Houckgeest, as attributed to Hendrick van Vliet); 1960, p. 330, no. 2567 (as Hendrick van Vliet); 1976, p. 582, no. A 1971 (as attributed to Hendrick van Vliet)

Citation

Gerdien Wuestman, 2022, 'attributed to Gerard Houckgeest, Interior of the Oude Kerk in Delft, with the Tomb of Vice-Admiral Pieter Pietersz Heijn, c. 1650', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6464

(accessed 21 September 2024 02:31:16).