Interior of a Protestant Gothic Church

Emanuel de Witte was born and trained in Alkmaar but had come to Delft by 1641 and joined the painters’ guild there in the following year. He remained in Delft for ten years but it was only at the end of his stay in the town, around 1650, that he began to paint the church interiors which form the greater part of his work. With his two Delft contemporaries, Gerard Houckgeest and Hendrick van Vliet, he developed this new type of subject-matter for painting.

They painted ‘portraits’ of the churches of Delft (and elsewhere), although they allowed themselves some leeway in the arrangement of individual architectural and other elements for compositional purposes. The tombs of the heroes of the Republic, notably those of Piet Hein in the Old Church and William the Silent in the New Church, were chosen as a patriotic focus for some of the compositions. Bright daylight, passing through the clear glass of the windows, illuminates the whitewashed interiors, with their tiled floors, memorial tablets and heraldic banners. Figures are glimpsed between the columns and in front of the tombs, not all of them treating their surroundings with appropriate reverence. In this painting the gravedigger pauses to gossip, while a man on the left sleeps, watched over by his dog. An aspect of his reserve is seen in his understated handling of the skull that is hardly visible in the shadowed debris of the open tomb.

Houekgeest seems to have been the innovator in this group of artists but De Witte, the greatest painter of the three, softened the harsh linearity of Houckgeest’s style. De Witte, unlike Houckgeest and Van Vliet, was a sensitive colourist, offsetting the severe black and white of the church interiors with patches of bright reds, yellows and greens. By January 1652 De Witte had moved to Amsterdam where he continued to specialize in church interiors.

It is a surprise to learn that the Interior of a Church in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (this picture) is one of de Witte’s compilations and not a view of a known building. The wooden ceiling and the little organ on the left are based on what de Witte saw at the Old Church in Amsterdam, the massive columns - but not their capitals - were modeled after the huge piers at St Bavo in Haarlem. The round arches and the late afternoon sunlight, which glows through the building, are purely imaginary. Distances are still clear, yet darkness will soon fall over this articulated play of forms. And de Witte not only could create majestic church interiors giving the convincing impression of reality; he also endowed them with a profound personal mood. His tonal design organizes the picture plane in a slightly geometrical fashion and substantially contributes to the articulation of the spatial effect. The movements and gestures of his figures are appropriate to the silence suggested by his dark interiors.