Pieter Saenredam

While artists before Saenredam mostly painted fantasy churches, he always relied on existing buildings. He worked ‘after life’, as he himself wrote on his drawings. He not only made sketches, but often also a ground plan and measured all kinds of architectural elements.

Before starting to paint, Saenredam used sketches and careful measurements taken in the church to produce a drawing precisely following the rules of central perspective. The construction is determined by his eye level and the exact location where he sat in the church.

Saenredam was one of the few 17th-century painters to use silver and gold foil in his paintings. He did this for the organ in the panel depicting the Sint Bavokerk: silver for the pipes and gold for the decorations.

Most of Saenredam’s paintings feature churches originally intended for Catholic worship. After the Reformation, their interiors were whitewashed to make them suitable for the Protestant faith. But white is never just white: Saenredam depicted the play of light on the walls with an unprecedented variety of tonal effects.

The popularity of Pieter Saenredam’s church interiors increased enormously in the 20th century. It seems that through the works of Piet Mondriaan and other abstract painters, people suddenly began looking with completely different eyes at his balanced compositions with their emphasis on straight lines.

Saenredam did not always paint the figures in his paintings himself. Although he was very good at this, as can be seen in the panel with the Odolphuskerk, he regularly left it to others. For example, the visitors in the Mariakerk were probably done by his friend Pieter Post.

In June 1636 Pieter Saenredam travelled from his hometown Haarlem to Utrecht. For twenty weeks on end, he drew the city’s many churches like a man possessed. He would use the sketches he made there as a starting point for his paintings until his death.

In the painting of the Mariakerk a man and a woman at the right study a relief on a pier, in which the tail and hind legs of a bull can just be distinguished. The inscription references a legend about the difficulties in building the church on the marshy terrain, which was solved by grounding it on bull hides.

On the large pillar in the foreground, Saenredam depicted three children’s drawings of two women and a bird around his signature. Although it has been thought that profound symbolism underlies this, the artist might have simply been making a joke.

Saenredam was occasionally also interested in exteriors. In 1641 he spent no less than six days working on a drawing of Amsterdam’s medieval Town Hall. In 1657, five years after the building had burned down, it formed the basis for a painting. It was intended for the Burgomasters’ Chamber of the new Town Hall, the current Palace on Dam Square.