Support The panel consists of three vertically grained oak planks (approx. 17.6, 27.7 and 14.5 cm), approx. 0.5 cm thick. The left edge has been slightly trimmed. The reverse is bevelled on all sides, though slightly less so on the right, and has plane marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1627. The panel could have been ready for use by 1638, but a date in or after 1644 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, thin, off-white ground extends partially over the edges of the support at the top and bottom and on the right, but not over the left edge. It contains white, black, ochre-coloured and orange pigment particles.
Underdrawing Infrared photography revealed an elaborate underdrawing in a dry medium, parts of which are also visible to the naked eye. It consists of broad perspective lines, lines indicating architectural details, and numerous broad cursory ones around some of the figures. The latter can be detected mainly in areas where the composition was not followed in the painting phase, for example around the hat and just to the left and right of the seated man near the opening in the choir screen and behind the back of the man standing to the right of him, where outlines of an upright figure are present. The standing woman seen between them in the far background was much taller in the underdrawing than in the painted version.
Paint layers The paint extends over the edges of the support at the top and bottom and on the right, but not over the left edge. The poor condition of the painting made it impossible to determine the build-up of the composition. It was apparently constructed from the back to the front in just one or two layers with smooth brushwork, mostly applied wet in wet, except for the details and figures. These were done with opaque paints on top of the already dried background, the figures being very delicately depicted with subtle transitions from light to dark and small, white highlights to create the illusion of three-dimensionality. The architecture was executed less precisely.
Erika Smeenk-Metz, 2024

Poor. The paint is heavily abraded throughout, mostly along the wood grain. It has numerous areas of loss and many broad drying cracks, covered with discoloured, slightly matte retouchings and overpaint. The varnish has yellowed.

…; from the dealer Dirck van der Aa, with SK-A-157, fl. 1,280, to the museum, 17 November 1802¹¹E.W. Moes and E. van Biema, De Nationale Konst-Gallery en het Koninklijk Museum, Amsterdam 1909, p. 59.

Object number: SK-A-455

It was under the influence of Gerard Houckgeest that Hendrick van Vliet began specializing in pictures of church interiors in the early 1650s, some of them outside his native Delft.⁴⁴On Van Vliet’s architectural paintings see above all H. Jantzen, Das niederländische Architekturbild, Leipzig 1910, pp. 101-07; W. Liedtke, Architectural Painting in Delft: Gerard Houckgeest, Hendrick van Vliet, Emanuel de Witte, Doornspijk 1982, pp. 57-68. This one of 1654 is of the Virgin’s choir and north transept seen from the choir of the Oude Kerk in Delft. The relief on the right-hand column is a monument of 1644 for the Delft burgomaster Johan van Lodensteyn and his wife Maria van Bleyswyck, which still hangs there today.⁵⁵J.A. Welu, 17th Century Dutch Painting: Raising the Curtain on New England Private Collections, exh. cat. Worcester (Worcester Art Museum) 1979, pp. 117-19; on the relief see also E.A. van Beresteyn, Grafmonumenten en grafzerken in de Oude Kerk te Delft, Assen 1938, p. 20, fig. 9. Van Vliet repeatedly depicted it in his views of the Oude Kerk. Elements such as an epitaph on a pillar, memorial tablets and a gravedigger in Van Vliet’s paintings of this kind are sometimes interpreted as references to the fleeting nature of life, but in this work they are less prominent than in other church interiors from his hand.⁶⁶On the interpretation of Van Vliet’s interiors see J.A. Welu, 17th Century Dutch Painting: Raising the Curtain on New England Private Collections, exh. cat. Worcester (Worcester Art Museum) 1979, pp. 117-19; W. Liedtke, Architectural Painting in Delft: Gerard Houckgeest, Hendrick van Vliet, Emanuel de Witte, Doornspijk 1982, p. 61. For the iconography of painted church interiors in general, see Müller in K. Renger et al., Die Sprache der Bilder: Realität und Bedeutung in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, exh. cat. Braunschweig (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum) 1978, pp. 93-94, 171-72.

With its arched top, a common feature in the artist’s oeuvre,⁷⁷See, for example, the 1658 interior of the Oude Kerk in the Toledo Museum of Art; illustrated in W. Liedtke et al., Vermeer and the Delft School, exh. cat. New York (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)/London (The National Gallery) 2001, p. 413. and the large number of figures scattered throughout the picture, this is a typical Van Vliet.⁸⁸Oddly enough, although it is signed and was acquired as a Van Vliet in 1802 it is listed as an Emanuel de Witte in the 1809 and 1843 collection catalogues. The composition builds on the interiors that Van Vliet had made of the Pieterskerk in Leiden in the preceding years.⁹⁹W. Liedtke, Architectural Painting in Delft: Gerard Houckgeest, Hendrick van Vliet, Emanuel de Witte, Doornspijk 1982, p. 61. Earlier motifs are repeated in the staffage too, including the dog urinating against the column on the right.¹⁰¹⁰See the views in Leiden’s Pieterskerk in Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum (1652), and Sarasota, The Ringling Museum of Art (1653); illustrated in W. Liedtke, Architectural Painting in Delft: Gerard Houckgeest, Hendrick van Vliet, Emanuel de Witte, Doornspijk 1982, pls. 42-43. Van Vliet remained a figure painter; some architectural elements are a little schematic, such as the capitals, but the people are invariably rendered with an eye for detail.¹¹¹¹Jansen succeeded in associating some figure studies in Van Vliet’s sketchbook in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam with two of the artist’s painted church interiors; see Jansen in J. Giltaij and G. Jansen (eds.), Perspectiven: Saenredam en de architectuurschilders van de 17e eeuw, exh. cat. Rotterdam (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen) 1991, pp. 316, 319, figs. 5-8. There are no known preliminary studies for the figures in the present panel.

Van Vliet produced several variants of this composition, adopting a slightly different vantage point each time. Two examples from 1659 and 1662 are in Philadelphia and Karlsruhe respectively,¹²¹²Philadelphia Museum of Art; P.C. Sutton, Northern European Painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art from the Sixteenth through the Nineteenth Century, coll. cat. Philadelphia 1990, pp. 334-36, and fig. 121-2 for a copy or replica of it in the Manchester Art Gallery. And Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe; J. Lauts, Katalog alte Meister bis 1800: Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, coll. cat. Karlsruhe 1966, I, p. 306, no. 2453, II, p. 427 (ill.). and two others without a date in Kassel and The Hague.¹³¹³Respectively Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister; B. Schnackenburg, Gesamtkatalog Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister Kassel, coll. cat. Kassel 1996, I, p. 309, II, pl. 193. And Mauritshuis; Q. Buvelot (ed.), Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis: A Summary Catalogue, coll. cat. The Hague 2004, p. 326, no. 203 (ill.). The Rijksmuseum picture is thus one of the earliest of these works. There is a partial copy of the lower left quadrant by the nineteenth-century artist Etienne Victor le Roy (1808-1878).¹⁴¹⁴Present whereabouts unknown; illustrated in the catalogue for the sale, Amsterdam (Christie’s), 8 October 1994, no. 41.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

H. Jantzen, Das niederländische Architekturbild, Leipzig 1910, pp. 102, 172, no. 527; W. Liedtke, Architectural Painting in Delft: Gerard Houckgeest, Hendrick van Vliet, Emanuel de Witte, Doornspijk 1982, p. 105, no. 32; W. Liedtke et al., Vermeer and the Delft School, exh. cat. New York (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)/London (The National Gallery) 2001, pp. 112-13; B.G. Maillet et al., Intérieurs d’églises: La peinture architecturale des écoles du Nord, 1580-1720, Wijnegem 2012, p. 423, no. M-1474

1809, p. 82, no. 349 (as Emanuel de Witte); 1843, p. 69, no. 353 (as Emanuel de Witte; ‘the oak visible and the panel damaged’); 1853, p. 29, no. 312 (fl. 2,000); 1858, p. 156, no. 347; 1880, p. 322, no. 386; 1887, p. 183, no. 1573; 1903, p. 286, no. 2566; 1934, p. 304, no. 2566; 1960, p. 330, no. 2566; 1976, p. 582, no. A 455

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024, 'Hendrick van Vliet, Interior of the Oude Kerk in Delft, 1654', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20026888