Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft, with the Tomb of Admiral Tromp

Van Vliet, a prolific Delft painter, carried on the Houckgeest-de Witte tradition in painting church interiors. He was first active as a portraitist and turned to painting church interiors in 1652.

Using a diagonal construction van Vliet’s interior of the Old Church at Delft offers a report on a significant new addition to the venerable church. It includes a full-view of the elaborate monument dedicated to Admiral Maerten Tromp which was unveiled in 1658, the year the picture is dated.

Not many people in front of the tomb had to be reminded that Tromp, whose most glorious victory was the defeat of the Spanish with a Dutch fleet much inferior in strength at the Battle of the Downs in 1639, was killed in the furious Battle of Scheveningen five years before the monument was dedicated. Most of them also knew that the tomb that can be glimpsed deep in the church’s choir belongs to Admiral Piet Hein whose capture of the Spanish silver fleet in 1628 made him a national hero particularly adored by the shareholders of the Dutch West Indies Company who, thanks to his prize, received a fifty per cent dividend on their shares that year; his coup also filled the treasury of the northern Netherlands and enabled Frederik Hendrick to lay siege and subdue ’s-Hertogenbosch, a Spanish stronghold in the south, with nearly 30,000 men.

The modest slab-less tomb on the church’s floor and the gravedigger who has paused to chat with a visitor, both familiar details in church interiors of the period, are reminders of the transience of more ordinary mortals. His painting includes children and dogs; well and less well-trained children and dogs are not infrequent accessories in these paintings.