Interior of a Gothic Church at Night Looking East

1636

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 49.5 cm × width 80 cm
outer size: depth 4.7 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower right, on the near pier on the south side of the nave: PETRUS / NEFS / 1636
inscription, centre, on a funerary tablet on the second pier on the north side of the nave: D[EO] O[PTIME] M[AXIMO] / PETRUS VAN / HOREN.EGR/EGIǢ, PROBI / TATIS. AC. / FAMAE HE / ELEMOSYMI / REIP ALI 64 / VEMURIS / PULCHRE AD MINIS.TU[?] (To God the best and greatest/ Peter van Horen famous for his probity and for his charity … he was responsible for beautifying the walls)
inscription, lower centre, on a funerary tablet on the second pier on the south side of the nave: SVPPELT / VRE . VAN. / HEER. AN / THONIVS: / LAVTERB / EINS.PAST / OIR. VAN D: / VRŸHEYT. / VAN.TVR / RENAVT. / ANNO 1625 (Burial place of Mr Anthony Lauterbeins priest of the Freedom of Turnhout in the year 1625)

Scientific examination and reports

dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 13 September 2007
technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 6 August 2008
paint samples: I. Verslype, RMA, 6 August 2008

Provenance

…; ? collection Hendrik van Heteren (1672-1749), The Hague;¹ his son, Adriaan Leonard van Heteren (1724-1800), The Hague, (‘Een Roomsche Kerk, met verscheide dag en kaarsligten, en vol beelden, door Petrus Neefs, h. 19 d. br. 30 en een half d. P. [49.7 x 79.8 cm]’);² his third cousin and godson, Adriaan Leonard van Heteren Gevers (1794-1866), Rotterdam, (‘Pierre Neefs, Belle église d’une perspective et d’un fini précieux avec quelques figures, bois, h. 19 l. 31 [49.7 x 81 cm]’);³ from whom, fl. 100,000, with 136 other paintings en bloc (known as the ‘Kabinet van Heteren Gevers’), to the museum, by decree of Lodewijk Napoleon, King of Holland, and through the mediation of his father Dirk Cornelis Gevers (1763-1839), 8 June 1809;⁴ on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 2002-11

Object number: SK-A-289

The artist

Peeter Neeffs I (Antwerp c. 1578 - Antwerp 1656-61)

Although Peeter Neeffs (Pieter Neefs or Nefs) I left a considerable body of work – as we now know it chiefly church interiors⁵ – the facts about his life are scarce. He was the third son of Aart Neefs and Margareta Verspreet; his father’s fortunes as a merchant seem to have been badly affected by the Spanish Fury of 1576. Peeter’s date of birth is not known but has been estimated as circa 1578. His mother died in 1582 and his father, after a second marriage, died impoverished in 1609 in Mechelen.

Neeffs was in his twenties when he enrolled as a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke in 1609, but is not recorded in Antwerp as having been an apprentice and so was probably taught elsewhere. The close relationship between his early work and that of Hendrik van Steenwyck II (c. 1580-1649) has recently been clarified by Fusenig.⁶ If, as is probable, Neeffs’s means of establishing the novel, geometrically calculated perspective of his views related to that of Van Steenwyck, it would seem indeed likely that Neeffs was early active in his studio. Fusenig has rejected the Dresden Interior of a Church, which bears a date of 1605, as Neeffs’s earliest work. He charts his activity from 1615, but presumably his legitimate activity in Antwerp began when he became a master, although there are no dated works to prove it. Later Neeffs may have been assisted by his sons Lodewyck (b. 1617) and Peeter (b. 1620); neither was ever registered in the guild, and the latter’s work – at least when working independently – was inferior.

Neeffs relied on other artists to provide the staffage and probably also architectural embellishments. Among his collaborators are notably Frans Francken II (1581-1642) and Frans Francken III (1607-1667), Adriaen van Stalbemt (1580-1662), Bonaventura Peeters I (1614-1652) and possibly his brother Gillis (1612-1653; see SK-A-288), and Jan van den Hecke (1620-1684).⁷ He also painted in 1650 the room in which Gonzales Coques (1618-1684) portrayed members of the Antwerp patriciate while other artists contributed the paintings on display.⁸

In the guild’s accounts of 1612/13 Neeffs was one of nine entrants listed as not having paid their dues in full. His circumstances may have improved by his marriage – in fact – in 1612 to Maria Lauterbiens (or Louterbeens; but spelt by Neeffs Lauterbeins, see the inscription on SK-A-289, whose family owned properties in Antwerp in which Neeffs lived until at least the last years of his life. In the same year Neeffs took on what was to be his only apprentice.

Neeffs was never called on to perform official duties in the guild of St Luke; but an indication of his close to middling social standing is that one of Jan Brueghel I’s daughters acted as godmother to a child born in 1623. Works by Neeffs were in such distinguished Antwerp collections as those of Cornelis van der Geest, 1628, Arnold Lundens, 1639-49, Jeremias Wildens, 1653, and Suzanna Willemssens, 1657.

The Lundens inventory shows that in this instance Neeffs’s work was valued in the lower range of market prices. In the 1650s he was in financial difficulties, as is shown in records concerning his sale of his share of the Lauterbiens’s house in the Hobokenstraat. Mortuary dues to the guild incurred by his wife’s death at this time were unpaid. Although he continued to work (e.g. SK-A-287), his circumstances are obscure and his date of death and place of burial are unknown. That he was dead by 1661 can be inferred by the past tense used by Cornelis de Bie in his brief tribute in Het gulden cabinet.

REFERENCES
F.J. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, 3 vols., Antwerp 1883, vol. ?, pp. 608-14; E. Duverger, Fontes historiae Artis Neerlandicae Bronnen voor de Kunstgeschiedenis van de Nederlanden: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, 13 vols., Brussels 1984-2004, IV, pp. 144, 379, Ibid. V, p. 57, Ibid. VI, p. 492, Ibid. VII, p. 351, and Ibid. IX, p. 3; T. Fusenig, ‘Neeffs und Co. Die Antwerpener Architecturmalerei im frühen 17. Jahrhundert’, in H. Borggrefe and V. Lüpkes (eds.), Hans Vredeman de Vries und die Folgen: Ergebnisse des in Kooperation mit dem Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Gdanska durchgeführten internationalen Symposions am Weserrenaissance-Museum Schloss Brake, Marburg 2005 (Studien zur Kultur der Renaissance 3), pp. 143-51; P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, ondere zinspreuk: ‘Wt Ionsten Versaemt’, 2 vols., Antwerp/The Hague 1864-76 (reprint Amsterdam 1961), I, pp. 454, 487, 493 and Ibid. II, p. 272

Entry

There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of this signed and dated interior of a church, whose support would have been available for use from 1635. Underdrawing of ruled orthogonals beneath the paving stones, visible to the naked eye, establishes the perspective; no such underdrawing was detected in the architecture, but infrared reflectography might reveal the artist’s means of establishing perspective. The chandelier is at the centre of the horizontal axis and just off centre of the vertical axis.

The figures were not reserved, and are by other hands; Härting believes they could be by Frans Francken III (1607-1667).⁹ But the well-dressed burgher and priest in the foreground, centre left, could rather be by his father Frans Francken II (1581-1642) – they recur in Peeter Neeffs’s Church Interior at Leipzig¹⁰ – as could the woman leading a group of three others at the far left. The other figures are by a different hand; they are not unlike those in the Rijksmuseum Interior of the Dominican Church (SK-A-288) of the same year. The same hand could have been responsible for painting the altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi shown in the side-chapel on the right. However, the cripple is a typical Francken motif.

The church has not been identified and could be an invention of Neeffs, which combines architectural features likely to be found in different churches in Antwerp. It is in the Gothic Perpendicular style; the blind window on the left has reticulated tracery first favoured in the fourteenth century and still popular in Antwerp in the sixteenth century. The altarpieces have tabernacle surrounds of a type then in fashion. Neeffs painted many variations of this view often as nocturnes and from a similar elevated viewpoint.

The subject of the church interior at night seems to have been a theme which Neeffs took over and developed from Hendrik van Steenwyck II (c. 1580-1649).¹¹ The figures in the left foreground are to attend the baptism of the baby held by the woman – the midwife¹² – who has entered the church preceding the mother and godmothers; the motif in daytime was seemingly introduced to the church interior by collabarators working with Hendrik van Steenwyck I (c. 1550-1603).¹³ A Mass is being said in a side chapel off the south aisle, under an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi.

There seems to be no aisle on the northern side of the church, the area was perhaps reserved for the offices; at the extreme left can be made out a twisting staircase, which is not as prominently placed as that in the Church Interior of 1618 in the British Royal Collection Trust.¹⁴ This unusual addition to a Gothic edifice may have been inspired by the print of 1604 in Hans Vredeman de Vries’s Perspective (part 1 of Book of Perspective),¹⁵ and its inclusion was perhaps encouraged by the example of Hendrik van Steenwyck II’s Church Interior of circa 1609, Wallraf Richartz Museum, Cologne.¹⁶ The stairs in the present picture may be understood (as in the Van Steenwyck) to provide access to the organ loft, set on the north side of the aisle, in which Neeffs has placed a choir. The only other extant version of this view – popular with Neeffs – to exhibit both the choir and twisting stairs is apparently that also of 1636 which was on the New York market in 2002.¹⁷

It is likely that both funerary inscriptions had personal relevance to the probably impecunious artist. The identity of Peeter van Horen, famous – as we learn from the inscription – for his charity has not been established, but maybe he had helped the artist financially. Würzbach records other inscriptions referring to Petrus van Horen in church interiors by Neeffs in the Brussels Museum and the Musée du Louvre;¹⁸ another is in the Mauritshuis.¹⁹ Antoon Lauterbeins (or Louterbeens), priest of the Freedom of Turnhout, was his brother-in-law. His date of death is not known, but Neeffs lived in two successive houses owned by his wife’s family, and inherited his brother-in-law’s share of a house in Hobokenstraat, which he sold in 1655.²⁰

Neeffs paid a similar tribute to Lauterbiens frequently; in three or four other church interiors, the inscriptions are variously dated 1625 (as in the present painting), 1630 and 1638.²¹ The reasons for this inconsistency remain obscure. Neither of the two inscriptions is recorded in the nineteenth-century survey of Antwerp memorials.²²

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

H. Jantzen, Das niederländische Architekturbild, Braunschweig 1979 [ed. princ. Leipzig 1910], no. 245

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 50, no. 218; 1832, p. 49, no. 224; 1843, p. 58, no. 303(?) as H. van Steenwyck; the support noted as of two planks; suggested as being in the area of Neefs); 1853, p. 20, no. 198 (fl. 800); 1864, p. 107, no. 230 (Peter Neeffs II); 1872, p. 113, no. 239; 1880, p. 408, no. 479; 1903, p. 191, no. 1716; 1934, p. 205, no. 1716; 1976, p. 409, no. A 289

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'Peeter (I) Neeffs, Interior of a Gothic Church at Night Looking East, 1636', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4700

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