Interior of the Oude Kerk in Delft

1654

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 74 cm × width 59.8 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower right, on the base of the foremost column: H. van Vliet / f 1654

Technical notes

Support The panel consists of three vertically grained oak planks (approx. 17.6, 27.7 and 14.5 cm), approx. 0.5 cm thick. The left edge has been slightly trimmed. The reverse is bevelled on all sides, though slightly less so on the right, and has plane marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1627. The panel could have been ready for use by 1638, but a date in or after 1644 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, thin, off-white ground extends partially over the edges of the support at the top and bottom and on the right, but not over the left edge. It contains white, black, ochre-coloured and orange pigment particles.
Underdrawing Infrared photography revealed an elaborate underdrawing in a dry medium, parts of which are also visible to the naked eye. It consists of broad perspective lines, lines indicating architectural details, and numerous broad cursory ones around some of the figures. The latter can be detected mainly in areas where the composition was not followed in the painting phase, for example around the hat and just to the left and right of the seated man near the opening in the choir screen and behind the back of the man standing to the right of him, where outlines of an upright figure are present. The standing woman seen between them in the far background was much taller in the underdrawing than in the painted version.
Paint layers The paint extends over the edges of the support at the top and bottom and on the right, but not over the left edge. The poor condition of the painting made it impossible to determine the build-up of the composition. It was apparently constructed from the back to the front in just one or two layers with smooth brushwork, mostly applied wet in wet, except for the details and figures. These were done with opaque paints on top of the already dried background, the figures being very delicately depicted with subtle transitions from light to dark and small, white highlights to create the illusion of three-dimensionality. The architecture was executed less precisely.
Erika Smeenk-Metz, 2024

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, 4 August 2008
paint samples: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, nos. SK-A-455/1-2, 4 August 2008
technical report: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, 4 August 2008
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 21 March 2011

Condition

Poor. The paint is heavily abraded throughout, mostly along the wood grain. It has numerous areas of loss and many broad drying cracks, covered with discoloured, slightly matte retouchings and overpaint. The varnish has yellowed.

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1946: partially cleaned
H. Plagge, 1964: treated

Provenance

…; from the dealer Dirck van der Aa, with SK-A-157, fl. 1,280, to the museum, 17 November 1802¹

Object number: SK-A-455

The artist

Hendrick van Vliet (Delft 1611/12 - Delft 1675)

It is thanks to a document of 24 April 1633 in which Hendrick Cornelisz van Vliet stated that he was 21 years old that we know that he was born in 1611 or 1612. He was a Catholic. According to the local chronicler Dirck van Bleyswijck he learned the basic principles of his craft from his nephew, the Delft portraitist Willem van Vliet, before going on to work in the studio of Michiel van Mierevelt. This connection is confirmed by the mention of his name in a list of creditors in the latter’s probate inventory. Van Vliet joined the Delft Guild of St Luke on 22 June 1632, and his earliest dated painting, Portrait of a Surgeon, is from 1635.² He was betrothed on 23 April 1639. The artist appears several times in the local archives, for instance on 7 February 1646, when he made a sworn statement at his request about his former pupil Floris de la Fée (?-1675/76), who had lodged with him the previous year but had left under a cloud after several altercations. In 1669 Van Vliet signed a contract to produce the portraits of three orphaned children of Delft. He and his wife made their wills on 7 October 1669 and 6 December 1672. Van Vliet’s last dated work is of an interior of Utrecht Cathedral of 1674.³ He died in relative poverty in 1675 and was buried in Delft’s Oude Kerk on 28 October.

Van Vliet’s earliest pictures are portraits, but around 1651 he began painting church interiors as well. Van Bleyswijck says that he also made history pieces, but only one is known today. There is also an imaginary landscape. Van Vliet’s only documented pupil is the Floris de la Fée mentioned above, by whom no work survives.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024

References
D. van Bleyswijck, Beschryvinge der stadt Delft, II, Delft 1667, p. 852; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, I, Amsterdam 1718, p. 121; H. Havard, L’art et les artistes hollandais, I, Paris 1879, p. 38; A. Bredius, ‘De schilder Hendrick Cornelisz. van Vliet te Delft’, 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.], V, Rotterdam 1882-83, pp. 284-87; J. Soutendam, ‘Necrologium van Delftse kunstenaars opgemaakt uit de Begrafenisboeken in het Archief van Delft’, in ibid., VI, 1884-87, pp. 4-29, esp. p. 11; U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXIV, Leipzig 1940, pp. 463-64; J.M. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century, Princeton 1982, pp. 172-74; Jansen 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. 211; Liedtke in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, XXXII, New York 1996, p. 673; Liedtke in W. Liedtke et al., Vermeer and the Delft School, exh. cat. New York (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)/London (The National Gallery) 2001, p. 407; B.G. Maillet et al., Intérieurs d’églises: La peinture architecturale des écoles du Nord, 1580-1720, Wijnegem 2012, pp. 414-55

Entry

It was under the influence of Gerard Houckgeest that Hendrick van Vliet began specializing in pictures of church interiors in the early 1650s, some of them outside his native Delft.⁴ This one of 1654 is of the Virgin’s choir and north transept seen from the choir of the Oude Kerk in Delft. The relief on the right-hand column is a monument of 1644 for the Delft burgomaster Johan van Lodensteyn and his wife Maria van Bleyswyck, which still hangs there today.⁵ Elements such as an epitaph on a pillar, memorial tablets and a gravedigger in Van Vliet’s paintings of this kind are sometimes interpreted as references to the fleeting nature of life, but in this work they are less prominent than in other church interiors from his hand.⁶

With its arched top, a common feature in the artist’s oeuvre,⁷ and the large number of figures scattered throughout the picture, this is a typical Van Vliet.⁸ The composition builds on the interiors that Van Vliet had made of the Pieterskerk in Leiden in the preceding years.⁹ Earlier motifs are repeated in the staffage too, including the dog urinating against the column on the right.¹⁰ Van Vliet remained a figure painter; some architectural elements are a little schematic, such as the capitals, but the people are invariably rendered with an eye for detail.¹¹

Van Vliet produced several variants of this composition, adopting a slightly different vantage point each time. Two examples from 1659 and 1662 are in Philadelphia and Karlsruhe respectively,¹² and two others without a date in Kassel and The Hague.¹³ The Rijksmuseum picture is thus one of the earliest of these works. There is a partial copy of the lower left quadrant by the nineteenth-century artist Etienne Victor le Roy (1808-1878).¹⁴

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

H. Jantzen, Das niederländische Architekturbild, Leipzig 1910, pp. 102, 172, no. 527; W. Liedtke, Architectural Painting in Delft: Gerard Houckgeest, Hendrick van Vliet, Emanuel de Witte, Doornspijk 1982, p. 105, no. 32; W. Liedtke et al., Vermeer and the Delft School, exh. cat. New York (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)/London (The National Gallery) 2001, pp. 112-13; B.G. Maillet et al., Intérieurs d’églises: La peinture architecturale des écoles du Nord, 1580-1720, Wijnegem 2012, p. 423, no. M-1474

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 82, no. 349 (as Emanuel de Witte); 1843, p. 69, no. 353 (as Emanuel de Witte; ‘the oak visible and the panel damaged’); 1853, p. 29, no. 312 (fl. 2,000); 1858, p. 156, no. 347; 1880, p. 322, no. 386; 1887, p. 183, no. 1573; 1903, p. 286, no. 2566; 1934, p. 304, no. 2566; 1960, p. 330, no. 2566; 1976, p. 582, no. A 455

Citation

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024, 'Hendrick van Vliet, Interior of the Oude Kerk in Delft, 1654', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6462

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