Pieter Jansz. Saenredam

Saenredam was a friend of Holland’s foremost living architect Jacob van Campen (1596–1657), who designed, in the classical style, Haarlem’s ‘Nieuwe Kerk’—a church painted several times by Saenredam—as well as the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Van Campen drew a portrait of the artist (1628, British Museum, London inv. 1854,0628.2), showing him as a hunchback. Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), was an important early patron of Saenredam, owning three of his paintings. Huygens was a poet and an important advisor to the Stadholder, Frederick Prince of Orange to whom he introduced Rembrandt and Lievens. Saenredam’s portraits of churches are in direct contrast to those of his contemporaries in Delft, Emanuel de Witte (1617–1692), Hendrick van Vliet (1611–1675) and Cornelis de Man (1621–1706) whose interiors are painted with more baroque drama and a more dramatic sense of the play of light on stone, often filtered through windows. Instead, Saenredam endows his interiors with a simplicity and architectural minimalism which is more Protestant in sentiment.

Saenredam’s paintings were the product of a precise working method: he made perspectival drawings in situ, complemented with measurements and plans; from these he produced a final compositional drawing which was then transferred to the panel or canvas to be painted in the studio. By drawing a church from numerous viewpoints, he produced, in effect, an architectural portrait. He reproduced the way the human eye experiences space by the introduction of a wide-angled view such as one sees through a camera obscura. While his sophisticated use of linear perspective and crisply painted details led to a camera-realistic result, Saenredam was never pedantic about topographical accuracy. His subtle use of a muted palette adds to the airy lightness of space and brings a sublime aura to his subject. Like fellow Dutch Golden Age artist Vermeer, Saenredam’s minimalist visions enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the twentieth century.