Van der Heyden executed a few landscapes and still lifes, but was chiefly a painter of townscapes, notable for their exceptionally detailed handling. Imaginary views, anticipating the capricci of 18th-century Venetian painters, are common among his works - the figures are often by other artists.
Van der Heyden was a native of Gorinchem, though his family had moved to Amsterdam by 1650. He was trained, according to his biographer Houbraken, as a glass painter. Before 1661 he travelled extensively in the southern Netherlands and in Germany, making drawings later used in his paintings. From the late 1660s van der Heyden was also engaged in projects to improve street lighting and fire-fighting in Amsterdam.
Jan van der Heyden
1637 - 1712
Paintings by Jan van der Heyden
(Showing 6 of 7 works)
There is something rather mysterious about this rare – and tiny – landscape by Jan van der Heyden, who specialised in painting urban scenes in a highly precise and realistic way. In this picture he has, instead, thrown a sort of veil over the buildings, a screen of trees which obscures our view.T...
Not on display
Jan van der Heyden clearly enjoyed the discipline of painting very fine details. Although this is a very small picture, 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 p...
Not on display
This is one of at least four versions that Jan van der Heyden made of this scene of Cologne and its half-built medieval cathedral. It is an alluring view. He has captured the lengthy shadows and raking light of a bright morning in a city street populated with people from all walks of life.Most of...
Not on display
Jan van der Heyden had an outstanding ability to make buildings seem almost photographically real (at least, that’s how we might describe it today). He worked with extraordinary delicacy and precision, taking the trouble to delineate and shade the finest details of stone and brickwork and the pla...
Not on display
Although he liked to paint scenes that looked highly realistic, Jan van der Heyden made adjustments to what he saw, and often created entirely imaginary scenes. Sometimes he would compose fantasy buildings, combining elements from more than one structure. Here his approach is slightly different....
Not on display
This is a view of the south-east front of the Huis ten Bosch (‘House in the Wood’), which was built just outside The Hague as a summer palace for the wife of the head of state of the Netherlands. The building is shown in its original state, a decade or so after it was finished. Today it is used b...
Not on display
This is one of the best seventeenth-century examples of what today we might think of as a high-resolution image. The detail and brushwork are so fine that no matter how closely you look at, or zoom in on, the picture, it never quite seems to pixelate. Yet the painter has made a very strange mista...
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