Interior of a Protastant Gothic Church by WITTE, Emanuel de

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Interior of a Protastant Gothic Church

1668
Oil on canvas, 78,5 x 111,5 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

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.

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.