The Westernmost Bays of the South Aisle of the Mariakerk in Utrecht

c. 1640 - c. 1645

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 39 cm × width 30 cm
outer size: depth 5.7 cm (support incl. frame)

Technical notes

The support is a vertically grained oak plank. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1608. The panel could have been ready for use by 1619, but a date in or after 1625 is more likely. The thin ground layer appears to be whitish in colour. The architecture was underdrawn. The paint was applied quite smoothly, and more thickly along the contour lines. The figures were painted over the background. (The painting was examined in a climate box.)

Scientific examination and reports

dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 14 February 2002
technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 22 September 2004

Condition

Fair. There are discoloured retouchings in the background. The varnish layer was unevenly applied, and there are several varnish droplets in the tile floor.

Provenance

...; sale, A.G. de Visscher, The Hague (Venduhuis der Notarissen), 3 June 1885, no. 7, as Van Steenwijk (H. van), fl. 46.60, to the museum¹

Object number: SK-A-1189

The artist

Pieter Jansz Saenredam (Assendelft 1597 - Haarlem 1665)

Pieter Jansz Saenredam, son of the engraver Jan Pietersz Saenredam and Anna Pauwelsdr, was born on 9 June 1597 in Assendelft. In 1608, a year after his father’s death, he and his mother moved to Haarlem. According to Cornelis de Bie, Saenredam studied painting with Frans Pietersz de Grebber from 1612 till 1622. On 24 April 1623, he joined the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, in which he played an active role; between 1633 and 1642, he is mentioned as secretary, warden and dean. On 5 December 1638, he married Aefjen Gerrits in Bloemendaal near Haarlem. Their only child, a daughter named Anna, was born in 1639.

Saenredam was acquainted with the architect Jacob van Campen, who was his fellow pupil in De Grebber’s workshop, and with Constantijn Huygens, private secretary to the Dutch stadholder. A portrait of Saenredam drawn by Jacob van Campen in 1628 has led to the speculation that he was hunchbacked, but there is no evidence to support this. Saenredam lived all of his life in Haarlem, but went on sketching tours to other towns, such as ’s-Hertogenbosch (1632), Assendelft (1633, 1634, 1643 and 1654), Alkmaar (1635/38 and 1661), Utrecht (1636), Amsterdam (1641), and Rhenen (1644). On 31 December 1652 he and the Haarlem landscape painter Pieter de Molijn valued a number of paintings. He may also have acted as an art dealer. In 1658 he sold a painting of the Virgin by Jacob van Campen for 300 guilders, and in 1663 he asked 700 guilders for a painting by Pieter van Laer from the French connoisseur Balthasar de Monconys. Saenredam was a successful painter. On 30-31 July 1658 he sold his famous portrayal of the old town hall of Amsterdam for 400 guilders to the city’s burgomasters (SK-C-1409). One of his interiors of the St Bavokerk in Haarlem was included in the Dutch Gift to the English Crown in 1660. Saenredam was buried in St Bavo’s in Haarlem on 31 May 1665.

Saenredam was the first artist to specialize in faithful depictions of actual churches. His early work consists of drawings and designs for prints, some of which were made for Samuel Ampzing’s Beschryvinge ende lof der stad Haerlem. One of those designs is a drawing of 1627 of the interior of St Bavo’s in Haarlem.² His earliest dated painting is from 1628.³ From that year onwards, he confined himself to drawing and painting architecture, predominantly church interiors. He depicted churches in Haarlem, Utrecht and several other towns. Between 1629 and 1633 he made three landscape paintings with classical architecture after drawings by Maarten van Heemskerck. Towards the end of his career he painted several exterior views of churches and town halls. Some 60 paintings by Saenredam are known. Two of his pupils were Claes Cornelisz van Assendelft (in 1642) and Jacob van Campen’s nephew Claes Heerman (in 1651).

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

References
Ampzing 1628, p. 372; Schrevelius 1648, p. 381; De Bie 1661, p. 246; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 174; Bredius IV, 1917, p. 1130; Swillens 1935, pp. 1-3, 53-56, 141-43; Miedema 1980, passim; Schwartz/Bok 1990, pp. 301-17 (documents); Liedtke in Turner 1996, pp. 507-11; Van Thiel-Stroman 2006, pp. 293-98

Entry

This is the only one of the three views of the interior of Utrecht’s Mariakerk in the Rijksmuseum that lacks a signature or date.⁴ The small panel, which was auctioned in 1885 as a work by the architectural painter Hendrik van Steenwijck, was reattributed to the Utrecht artist Herman Saftleven in the museum’s inventory after its acquisition. Bredius made the correct attribution to Saenredam the following year.⁵ The fall of light is more dramatic than is usual with Saenredam,⁶ but apart from that, the style, technique and composition are typical of the artist. The three darkly clad figures are probably autograph, but doubts about the oversized figure on the right are well-founded, as Helmus has remarked.⁷

Defoer and Dirkse associated the painting with the tomb of the painter Jan van Scorel (1495-1562), who was also a canon of this church,⁸ and whose grave lay in this aisle. Their suggestion that the man in the middle seems to be gesturing towards the grave of the 16th-century artist, possibly in reference to the fleeting nature of earthly fame, is no more than a nice thought. In the first place, Van Scorel’s grave, which must have been under the slab in the left background,⁹ is not recognizable as such, and on top of that, assuming that the man is pointing at anything at all, it is not at that grave slab. He is clearly not standing beside the slabs by chance, though, for in view of his apron he must be a grave-digger, as Pieter van Thiel has pointed out.¹⁰

There are no known preliminary studies for this painting, which is dated to the late 1630s or early 1640s in the most recent studies.¹¹ Taking into account that Saenredam’s small interiors of a particular church were generally made later than the more ambitious versions,¹² and that almost all the dated interiors of the Mariakerk were executed between 1637 and 1641, the most likely date for this painting is in the first half of the 1640s.

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. 261.

Literature

Swillens in Utrecht 1961, pp. 225-26, no. 166; Schwartz/Bok 1990, pp. 149, 285, no. 166; Helmus in Utrecht-Los Angeles 2000/02, pp. 180-82, no. 32, with earlier literature

Collection catalogues

1886, p. 70, no. 316**; 1887, p. 149, no. 1259; 1903, p. 235, no. 2098; 1934, p. 254, no. 2098; 1976, p. 492, no. A 1189; 2007, no. 261

Citation

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, The Westernmost Bays of the South Aisle of the Mariakerk in Utrecht, c. 1640 - c. 1645', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5353

(accessed 8 May 2024 03:29:09).