The interior of the New Church in Delft, with the Tombe of William the Silent, crafted by Hendrik de Keyser

A year before his well-known picture of 1651 in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, also on panel and small of size (56 x 38 cm.), Houckgeest painted this impressive composition of the interior of the New Church in Delft. Together with the large depiction of the New Church in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (125.7 x 89 cm.), also signed with monogram and also dated ‘GH 1650’, this is among the artist’s very first known depictions of an existing church interior and, even more importantly, in a new inventive manner.

Houckgeest is acknowledged as one of the greatest innovators of Delft church interiors. Using a two-point perspective scheme and columns dominating the foreground, as analysed by Walter Liedtke (op. cit., 1982, p. 49), he succeeded in offering the observer a sensation of the extensive depth and height of the church whilst still focussing on the Tomb of William the Silent in the choir. This was a revolutionary shift in architectural painting from the traditional manner such as previously known of Pieter Saenredam and contemporaries. Deploying this diagonal perspective, rendered a more spontaneous and natural effect, as if one was actually inside the church. This sense of reality is enhanced by the fact that the nearest column is obstructing a full view of the splendid stone monument. Houckgeest further engages the viewer by placing ‘other visitors’ gathered around and facing the tomb. The entire composition is precisely structured and coherent, every geometric form is placed in space with great thought. In his publication of 2000, Liedtke comments this lot is “very much a cabinet picture in its scale and fine execution. The composition impressed [Emanuel] De Witte, while the execution and illusionism – the columns in the foreground wonderfully set off against the choir’s space – look forward to a number of small pictures by Van Vliet of about a decade later” (op. cit., 2000, p. 114).

The National Museum in Stockholm houses an enlarged repetition of the present lot (inv. No. NM 464). In 1982 Liedtke rejected the attribution and argued Hendrick van Vliet must have painted it around 1660 (op. cit., 1982, p. 104 under no. 25) to re-attribute it to Houckgeest upon seeing the original in 1996 in Delft (see: op. cit., 2000, p. 115).

The New Church in Delft was constructed in the 14th and 15th centuries and chosen for William the Silent's burial in 1584. During the Dutch Revolt the States-General decided to build a memorial tomb for the ‘Father of the Fatherland’. The marble mausoleum, richly decorated with bronze statues, was designed by the Amsterdam architect and stonemason Hendrik de Keyser and completed following his death by his son, Pieter. Since then, members of the House of Orange-Nassau have been interred in its crypt. The monument was a popular subject for contemporaries and close followers of Houckgeest, such as Emanuel de Witte, Cornelis de man, Hendrick van Vliet and Daniel de Blieck.