The Westernmost Bays of the South Aisle of the Mariakerk in Utrecht, Pieter Jansz Saenredam, c. 1640 - c. 1645 – (Pieter Jansz Saenredam) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Pieter Jansz Saenredam

Date: 1645

Size: 39 x 30 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

This is the only one of the three views of the interior of Utrecht’s Mariakerk in the Rijksmuseum that lacks a signature or date.4 The small panel, which was auctioned in 1885 as a work by the architectural painter Hendrik van Steenwijck, was reattributed to the Utrecht artist Herman Saftleven in the museum’s inventory after its acquisition. Bredius made the correct attribution to Saenredam the following year.5 The fall of light is more dramatic than is usual with Saenredam,6 but apart from that, the style, technique and composition are typical of the artist. The three darkly clad figures are probably autograph, but doubts about the oversized figure on the right are well-founded, as Helmus has remarked.7 Defoer and Dirkse associated the painting with the tomb of the painter Jan van Scorel (1495-1562), who was also a canon of this church,8 and whose grave lay in this aisle. Their suggestion that the man in the middle seems to be gesturing towards the grave of the 16th-century artist, possibly in reference to the fleeting nature of earthly fame, is no more than a nice thought. In the first place, Van Scorel’s grave, which must have been under the slab in the left background,9 is not recognizable as such, and on top of that, assuming that the man is pointing at anything at all, it is not at that grave slab. He is clearly not standing beside the slabs by chance, though, for in view of his apron he must be a grave-digger, as Pieter van Thiel has pointed out.10 There are no known preliminary studies for this painting, which is dated to the late 1630s or early 1640s in the most recent studies.11 Taking into account that Saenredam’s small interiors of a particular church were generally made later than the more ambitious versions,12 and that almost all the dated interiors of the Mariakerk were executed between 1637 and 1641, the most likely date for this painting is in the first half of the 1640s. Gerdien Wuestman, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 261.