Assendelft 1597 - 1665 Haarlem
Netherlands
1,000,000 – 3,000,000 USD +
Saenredam’s vision was a significant development from the fanciful inventions painted half a century earlier by artists such as Hendrik van Steenwijck the Elder (ca. 1550–1603). Among the sites depicted in the sixty or so known works in his painted oeuvre, Saenredam frequently featured the Cathedral of St. Bavo (the ‘Grote Kerk’) in Haarlem, where he was to be buried. He also ventured out of Haarlem, where he spent most of his life, to paint churches in other Dutch cities such as Utrecht, Amsterdam and his birthplace Assendelft.
Saenredam was a friend of Holland’s foremost living architect Jacob van Campen (1596–1657), who designed, in the classical style, Haarlem’s ‘Nieuwe Kerk’—a church painted several times by Saenredam—as well as the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Van Campen drew a portrait of the artist (1628, British Museum, London inv. 1854,0628.2), showing him as a hunchback. Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), was an important early patron of Saenredam, owning three of his paintings. Huygens was a poet and an important advisor to the Stadholder, Frederick Prince of Orange to whom he introduced Rembrandt and Lievens. Saenredam’s portraits of churches are in direct contrast to those of his contemporaries in Delft, Emanuel de Witte (1617–1692), Hendrick van Vliet (1611–1675) and Cornelis de Man (1621–1706) whose interiors are painted with more baroque drama and a more dramatic sense of the play of light on stone, often filtered through windows. Instead, Saenredam endows his interiors with a simplicity and architectural minimalism which is more Protestant in sentiment.
Saenredam’s paintings were the product of a precise working method: he made perspectival drawings in situ, complemented with measurements and plans; from these he produced a final compositional drawing which was then transferred to the panel or canvas to be painted in the studio. By drawing a church from numerous viewpoints, he produced, in effect, an architectural portrait. He reproduced the way the human eye experiences space by the introduction of a wide-angled view such as one sees through a camera obscura. While his sophisticated use of linear perspective and crisply painted details led to a camera-realistic result, Saenredam was never pedantic about topographical accuracy. His subtle use of a muted palette adds to the airy lightness of space and brings a sublime aura to his subject. Like fellow Dutch Golden Age artist Vermeer, Saenredam’s minimalist visions enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the twentieth century.
Selected artworks
Top 3 auction prices
2004
2016
2012
Details
Notable exhibitions
Utrecht, Centraal Museum, The Sacred Spaces of Pieter Saenredam, 4 November 2000 – 4 February 2001; travelled to Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 16 April – 7 July 2002. Curated by Liesbeth M. Helmus.
Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Perspectives: Saenredam and the Architectural Painters of the 17th Century, 15 September – 24 November 1991. Curated by Jeroen Giltaij and Guido Jansen.
Paris, Institut Néerlandais, Saenredam, 1597-1665. Peintre des églises, 31 January – 15 March 1970.
Books on Pieter Saenredam
Liesbeth M. Helmus ed., Peter Saenredam, the Utrecht work : paintings and drawings by the 17th-century master of perspective, Los Angeles, 2002.
Jeroen Giltaij and Guido Jansen, Perspectives. Saenredam and the architectural painters of the 17th century, exh. cat. Rotterdam, 1991.
Gary Schwartz and Marten Jan Bok, Pieter Saenredam. The painter and his time, English trans., London, 1990.
Saenredam, 1597-1665. Peintre des églises, exh. cat., Paris, 1970.
Cornelis de Bie, Het Gulden Cabinet vande Edel Vry Schilder-Const, 1662, reprint, Antwerp, 1971.