Interior of an Imaginary Catholic Church in Classical Style

1638 · Private collection

interior

In this panel Houckgeest reinterprets the Early Christian Basilica in the style of his own time. Certain elements of the design, such as the barrel-vaulted narthex and the giant order of columns and pilasters in the foreground, recall Catholic churches built in the Spanish Netherlands during the first third of the seventeenth century. Similar compositions were painted from the 1620s onward by Dirck van Delen and Bartholomeus van Bassen.

About the Artist

Gerard Houckgeest

1600 – 1661

Dutch painter who worked in Delft and specialized in church interiors. He was probably a van Bassen pupil and began as a painter of imaginary church interiors and renaissance buildings. Most likely he was in England during the 1630s; Charles I owned at least five 'prospectives' by or partly by him. His fictive Palace Interior of 1635, his earliest existing dated painting, is still at Hampton Court. Houckgeest is documented in Delft in the 1640s. His first known depiction of an actual church interior is his unexpected New Church in Delft with the Tomb of Willem the Silent, dated 1650, now at Hamburg. During the following 4-5 years he painted about half-dozen pictures of both the New and Old Church of Delft using the innovative diagonal perspective of the Hamburg painting. After these radical innovations he did no remain in Delft for very long. By 1651 he is recorded as a resident of Steebergen, a town about forty kilometres south of Rotterdam, and two or three years later he settled in Bergen op Zoom in North Brabant.

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