Jan van der Heyden, A Square before a Church

Jan van der Heyden clearly enjoyed the discipline of painting very fine details. Although this is a small picture – 21.8 by 28.9 cm, almost exactly the same size as a piece of A4 paper set on its side – he has delineated many of the leaves of the trees individually. If you look closely at the grey roof of the church, you can see that he has used incredibly fine lines of black paint to suggest the patterns made by the tiles. To make these, he would have probably worked with a paintbrush with a single hair.

This is typical of his painting style. But as much as he relished such precision, he also enjoyed thinking imaginatively. In fact, painting was not his primary source of income and he kept many of his finished pictures. Much of his wealth came from his work as an inventor and engineer. Fascinated by the principles and challenges of fighting fires, he invented a highly effective water pump and also a new street lighting system for Amsterdam. As a result he was appointed both director of the city’s lighting and, a little later, of its fire service.

This ingenuity also infuses his art. He seems to have enjoyed the challenge of ‘improving’ or altering reality, and of depicting entirely imaginary buildings and townscapes and making them seem real. This picture is almost certainly an example of his inventive streak – a fantasy composed of elements of different buildings that he had seen during his travels in Germany and Holland. The architecture of the church is typical of the mid-sixteenth-century Gothic of Franconia, Braunschweig and the area of northern Germany surrounding Cologne. The simpler brick building on the left seems more Dutch in character. 

The figures in van der Heyden’s paintings are important additions to the architectural views, adding scale, life and interest to the composition. Here he seems to have painted them himself, but he would also sometimes ask other specialist painters to add them once he had finished.

There are several other examples of such imagined scenes in our collection, including An Imaginary View of Nijenrode Castle and the Sacristy of Utrecht Cathedral and An Architectural Fantasy.