Interior of the St Odulphuskerk in Assendelft, Seen from the Choir to the West

Entry

This subtly coloured painting is one of the high points in Saenredam’s oeuvre.⁷ It shows the sober interior of the late-Gothic St Odulphuskerk in Assendelft, the village in the province of North Holland where Saenredam was born.⁸ On the right is the tomb of the lords of Assendelft.⁹ In the foreground, to the right of centre, is the tombstone of the engraver Jan Saenredam (c. 1565-1607), the artist’s father. That stone is the only surviving part of the church, which was demolished in 1852.¹⁰

Saenredam painted this church at least four times, the earliest work being dated 1634,¹¹ and the last 1655.¹² There is an undated work in Turin.¹³ The views in St Odulphus’s are the only painted church interiors by Saenredam in which a service is being held.¹⁴

Like so many of Saenredam’s paintings, this work of 1649 went through a long gestation period. The artist used a construction drawing made six years earlier (fig. a),¹⁵ which in turn was based on a preliminary study made nine years before that (fig. b).¹⁶ The construction drawing was transferred to the ground of the panel by indentation.

Along the lower edge of the tomb there is an almost illegible inscription in which Saenredam described the subject of the painting and added his signature and the date. He himself overpainted this inscription, which is almost identical to the one on the pew on the left. He may have decided to move it in order to spread the inscriptions more evenly over the composition.

Several authors have noted that Saenredam toned down some of the Gothic details seen in the preliminary study.¹⁷ The lancet arches in the drawing, for instance, have become round-headed in the painting. Vermeulen, who demonstrated that the St Odulphuskerk was largely rebuilt between 1642 and 1644, suggested that these modifications may have been the result of structural changes.¹⁸ However, Liedtke’s hypothesis that alterations of this kind by Saenredam were prompted by his preference for classicist architecture is more plausible.¹⁹

There is reason to believe that one of the interiors of St Odulphus’s was not intended for sale. Saenredam’s grandson Pieter Vermeulen owned two of his paintings, one of which was of the church in Assendelft, which he bequeathed to his nephew Pieter van Dielen on 17 December 1718.²⁰ The tentative suggestion made by Schwartz and Bok that this was the painting now in the Rijksmuseum is very tempting, given the prominence of the tombstone.²¹ The stone is missing in the other known versions.

The figures in the painting in Turin mentioned above are traditionally attributed to Saenredam’s fellow townsman Adriaen van Ostade, and several authors have also associated the staffage in the Rijksmuseum work with Van Ostade.²² However, there can be no doubt that Saenredam painted them himself, as Plietzsch and Giltaij have already pointed out.²³ The brushstrokes of the top layer of paint in the background definitely go around the outlines of the figures. This is most clearly visible in the vicinity of the standing preacher. One striking feature of Saenredam’s figures, apart from their rather sketchy nature and the dark colours, is the almost complete absence of cast shadows.²⁴

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. 262.