Ambulatory of the New Church in Delft with the Tomb of William the Silent

interior

In his paintings Houckgeest chose a perspective construction with two vanishing points: one on the left-hand edge of the painting and one on the right in the picture. After he introduced his own approach to representing actual church interiors in his panel now in Hamburg, he explored the spaces of the Nieuwe Kerk and Oude Kerk for similar views. In all his paintings of Delft churches a colonnade is aligned diagonally with the picture plane and the architecture recedes to both sides.

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Ambulatory of the New Church in Delft with the Tomb of William the Silent

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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