Hendrick Cornelisz. van Vliet

In this small panel, Hendrick van Vliet has captured the quiet, light filled interior of the Oude Kerk in his hometown of Delft. By 1654, after the departure from Delft of fellow architectural and perspective painters, such as Gerard Houckgeest and Emmanuel de Witte, Van Vliet enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the production of the increasingly popular depictions of the monuments and interiors of the two great churches of that city: the Oude Kerk (Old Church) and the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church). His unrivalled position further enhanced his reputation, and indeed, he was the only living painter from Delft cited by Dirck van Bleyswijck in his Beschryvinge der Stadt Delft (1667), wherein Van Vliet's work was described as “…very well foreshortened and illusionistic, as well as colored naturally.” 

In this scene, Van Vliet captures a view looking northwest from the southern aisle of the Gothic-style church. A soft light casts a golden hue across the calm interior, enlivened by several figures, the most of which are the three young boys gathered in the lower right foreground. To the left of these figures is a solid marble column, a typical device used by Van Vliet to draw the eye into the vast space depicted, a sense of perspective further enhanced by the floor's diagonal tiles.  A dark, curved shadow frames the scene's upper register, as if the viewer peers through a columned arch. A similar compositional element is found in other of Van Vliet's interior scenes of the Oude Kerk (though depicted from different vantage points), including in canvases in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe¹ and the Baltimore Museum of Art.² A view by Van Vliet from a somewhat more comparable vantage point, though from a point closer to the Church's transept, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.³ 

1. Inv. no. 2453, dated 1662, oil on canvas, 55.2 by 46.5 cm. 

2. Inv. no. 1939.185, oil on canvas, 100.3 by 83.8 cm.  

3.  Inv. no. 1976.23.2, dated 1660, oil on canvas, 82.6 by 66 cm.