Johannes Bosboom, The Interior of the Bakenesserkerk, Haarlem

The nineteenth-century painter Johannes Bosboom is best known for his paintings of the interiors of churches, cloisters and synagogues, in which the figures often wear seventeenth-century costumes. He trained with Bartholomeus Johannes van Hove, a painter of theatre sets and town views.

Bosboom’s pictures are in the tradition of church interiors by seventeenth-century Dutch artists such as Pieter Saenredam, Emanuel de Witte, Hendrick van Steenwyck the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Although Bosboom shared a fascination for the quality of light with his seventeenth-century predecessors, his dynamic, loose brushwork is very different to their meticulous, carefully delineated images.

Bosboom made a number of sketches and paintings of this church, the Bakenesserkerk in Haarlem, which dates from the fifteenth century and was partly rebuilt in the seventeenth century. This painting shows the south aisle and figures in seventeenth-century costume. Although the eye is initially drawn to the red cloak of the man on the left, the primary focus of the painting is the play of golden light through the windows and across the creamy stone and plaster walls of the church. The light glimmers on the brass chandeliers, highlighting some and silhouetting others. A service appears to be underway on the right, where women in white coifs sit in pews and apparently listen to a cleric preaching from a pulpit.

Bosboom’s rapid, dynamic brushwork suggests these effects of light and atmosphere with daring economy – the sunny windows are stroke upon stroke of impastoed white, while the features of the standing woman are merely implied by two dots of brown. From close up the scene and pictorial depth dissolve into a richly textured surface of opaque paint, but from a distance an entirely believable sunlit interior with an imaginary cast of seventeenth-century characters is conjured.

This picture is similar to a larger one (Amsterdam Museum, Fodor Collection) which is thought to have been painted by Bosboom in about 1860. The National Gallery’s picture is more broadly painted, and therefore probably dates to about 1870–5. It is signed at bottom left.