Pieter Jansz Saenredam
(1597 - 1665) |
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Architectural Themes, paintings of whitewashed church interiors Art Work
| Name: |
Pieter Jansz Saenredam |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Assendelft |
| Nationality: |
Dutch |
| Birth: |
1597 |
| Death: |
1665 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Architectural Themes, paintings of whitewashed church interiors |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
Dutch Golden Age |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
| Perhaps the greatest seventeenth-century painter of architectural themes, Pieter Saenredam is remarkable for reconciling two polar opposites in a unique fashion. In his paintings a meticulous realism is seamlessly fused with the most poetic abstraction. Saenredam's very rationality and dedication to specifics becomes the basis for the seventeenth century's most abstract compositions. Already famous in his lifetime, Saenredam was sensitive to geometry, simplicity, mathematical relationships, and subtly restrained color harmonies; this has earned him recognition and admiration as a forerunner of nonobjective art. Paradoxically, he achieved this reputation in the most objective of all pursuits, the portrayal of real places - the interiors and exteriors of buildings, especially churches. Huizinga has called him an indispensable artist of the age, whose devotion to exacting detail was harnessed by an immense talent to find the universal in the specific, whose unsentimental vision yielded the most affecting and poignant images, and who could convincingly portray the immense space and minutiae of a great building in a relatively small painting and thereby celebrate the making of art in the process, Saenredam's biography is as deceptively simple as his images are and can be briefly recounted. Born in 1597, Pieter was the son of the engraver Jan Pietersz Saenredam, who died in 1607. In 1609 his mother, Anna Pauwels, moved with her son to Haarlem, which became Pieter's home until his death. In 1612 Pieter went to study with Frans de Grebber and remained with him for ten years (sources vary as to whether he left in 1622 or 1623). In 1623 he joined the Haarlem painters' guild. While with de Grebber, Saenredam encountered a fellow pupil, Jacob van Campen, who must have studied with de Grebber before 1618, whereupon he left for Italy, returning to Haarlem in 1624. Van Campen became an important architect and was Saenredam's lifelong friend. The two often collaborated later on. In 1617 we find Saenredam's first dated surviving work, a drawing depicting a view of houses outside Haarlem. He began modestly enough, working for the Haarlem printer Adriaen Roman (1590-after 1642). He spent much of the time from 1627 to 1630 providing Roman with twenty drawings (involving accurate portrayals of various aspects of Haarlem's architecture). Perhaps Saenredam was inspired to conduct his lifelong pursuit of buildings from that commission, which resulted in illustrations for the third edition (published 1628) of Reverend Samuel Ampzing*s book The Description and Praise of the Town of Haarlem > which included views of St. Bavo outside and inside. In 1625 Pieter traveled to The Hague; by 1627 he was back in Haarlem. In 1628 we have the first surviving signed and dated painted example (now in Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum) of what became a lifelong interest: the depiction of an actual, not imaginary, architectural scene, the first of the many portrayals of St. Bavo in Haarlem he would make in his lifetime (and where, appropriately enough, Saenredam is now buried). Until 1629 Saenredam was working on drawings and paintings of St. Bavo (the Great Church); another painting of its interior is preserved in Philadelphia (Museum of Art, Johnson Collection); in 1632 we know he worked in Bois- Ie-Duc. From 1633 to 1634 he was active in Assendelft, returning that year to Haarlem to again make studies of the Great Church. In fact, Saenredam's interest in the St. Bavo church lasted throughout his career; one of his most beautiful interpretations of its interior is signed and dated 1660, and is now preserved in the Worcester (MA) Art Museum. In 1635 Saenredam was elected secretary of his guild, and the following year he went to Utrecht. In 1638 he married Aefje Gerritsdr. Thus, through marriage he joined the extended family of Lieven de Key, a leading Haarlem architect during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1640 Saenredam is mentioned as steward of his guild in Haarlem, and in 1642 he became its dean. Though Haarlem continued to be his home, he made other trips (he was in Rhenen in 1644, in Assendelft in 1654, in Alkmaar in 1661). Suffering from a physical deformity (he was a hunchback, and there survives a moving portrait in pencil by his friend van Campen), Saenredam has been called a recluse who may have found comfort and release in his solitary occupation, which he pursued with single-minded meticulousness. Such a description runs counter to our knowledge of Saenredam's effective service in his guild. His financial security (gained from inherited and invested funds) permitted him the freedom to pursue his interests with a dedication less frequently granted to his economically pressed colleagues. His method involved making careful sketches of the site, including ground plans with measurements that were transcribed into large construction drawings, executed with great detail yet brilliant simplicity. Besides St. Bavo's in Haarlem, which he studied in various campaigns during the 1620s, 1630s, and 1660s, Saenredam recorded other Haarlem buildings including the Nieuwe Kerk, which he painted and drew mainly in the 1650s, and the town hall of Haarlem, a subject of the 1620s and 1630s. His excursions to other cities yielded the remainder of his subject matter. His trip to Bois-le-Duc in 1632 produced the drawings of St. John's Church and the town hall. At Assendelft between 1633 and 1634 he produced drawings and paintings of the city and of St. Odulphus's Church, while his year at Utrecht in 1636 yielded a vast body of paintings and drawings of Utrecht Cathedral, city views, Buurkerk, St. Catherine's Church, St. James*s Church, St. John's Church, St. Mary's Church, and St. Peter's Church. In 1641 Saenredam produced a large drawing of Amsterdam's Town Hall; his trip to Alkmaar in the late 1630s and again in 1661 yielded studies and paintings of the Great Church (also known as St. Lawrence's Church) and the Chapel Church. Nonetheless, each trip did not result in the same quantity of drawings. From 1628 to 1636 he made nearly fifty drawings; from 1637 to 1663 (the year of his last known picture) less than twenty drawings are known. Most of these later drawings were made during the summer months and were related to the architectural activities of his friend van Campen. From 1644 to 1661, Saenredam's surviving on-site drawings all revolve around the Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem, designed by van Campen. Saenredam*s paintings, in contrast to his drawings, were produced steadily; modern scholars estimate his output at about one-and-a-half paintings per year until 1663. Saenredam's drawings evidently became the stockpile from which he could make his paintings, some of which reveal tracings. About 150 drawings are known today. His trip to Assendelft in the 1650s may have inspired him to turn to painted town views, which crop up after this time. Though they are methodical, Saenredam's paintings rise above mere perspective renderings to become wonderfully distilled interpretations of space, form, shape, color, and light. The majority of his paintings (some fifty are known) are based on direct observation, but some (such as his View of the Colosseum in Rome, dated 1631) are based on sketches from Maerten van Heemskerck's Roman Sketchbook, which Saenredam owned (it is now in Berlin). His steady pace of dated paintings allows us to trace Saenredam's shifting interests over time. His interiors of the late 1620s and early 1630s are characterized by subtle harmonies of grays and whites, nearly transparent in feeling, bathed in a soft white, with vertical movements gently alternated with Gothic arches. By 1632, in scenes such as Choir of the St. Peterskerk (private collection), Saenredam sharpened his contrasts of dark and light, made his architectural delineations crisper and sharper, and had the overall composition made up of fewer elements. With his exploration of the Mariakerk interiors during the later 1630s, scenes that are generally horizontal in format (see, for example, View across the Nave of the Mariakerk, dated 1638, Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum), the foreground elements are darkened, and space is achieved by shifts in scale as well as color. By the 1640s a new delicacy and subtlety has entered his paintings; a feeling of atmosphere, blending colors, and occasionally blurring forms is newly apparent, as evidenced by such pictures as Nave of the St. Pieterskerk, Utrecht (dated 1644, Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen). In the 1650s Saenredam reached an even higher level of artistry-his colors became more luminous, his descriptions at once more specific yet perfectly composed within his paintings. An especially beautiful example of his work of these years is Nave and Choir of the St. Catherine's Church, Utrecht (Banbury, Upton House, National Trust). Besides his numerous interiors, Saenredam added exterior views of churches to his repertoire toward the end of his life. In 1659 and 1662 he painted exteriors of the Mariakerk in Utrecht (see the example dated 1659 in the Hague, Mauritshuis), which show us the church from the view of the choir along the north wall; an example painted in 1662 (Madrid, Fundacion Thyssen-Bornemisza) shows us the time-worn facade. Combining invention with observation, Saenredam continued to paint with undiminished artistic powers until the end. Among his last paintings is Mariakerk and the Mariaplaats, Utrecht, with a View of the Domtoren and the Buurkerk (signed and dated 1662, Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen), which is not only majestic but preternaturally serene. Aging and growing physically weaker, Saenredam finally was buried on 31 May 1665, in his beloved St. Bavo Church in Haarlem. Saenredam influenced a host of younger painters of architectural subjects, including Bartholomeus van Bassen, the Berckheyde brothers,* Gerrit Houckgeest, Anthonie de Lorme, Hendrick van Vliet, and Emanuel de Witte. Though Job Berckheyde and Isaac van Nickelen painted church interiors in Haarlem, they seldom matched Saenredam's brilliance or his sparing and majestic interpretation of buildings. |
Samples of Work
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