BASSEN, Bartholomeus van

The painting represents a church interior with a beggar seated beneath a pillar and dogs playing in the foreground.

This painting is an example of the collaboration of Dutch artists in the 17th century. Van Bassen, the architectural painter, painted the architecture with great skill, leaving the figures in the painting to Esaias van de Velde.

The painting is signed and dated.

This dated work of 1614 is the earliest recorded painting by the artist. It is clearly based upon the works of the Antwerp artists, Pieter Neefs the Elder and Hendrick van Steenwijk the Elder. The interior depicted is probably meant to represent the Cathedral of Antwerp.

Van Bassen painted in 1638 this largely faithful view of the interior of the church at Rhenen, which adjoined the palace he had designed for the king and queen of Bohemia.

Van Bassen developed a specialty in lavishly decorated palace interiors with elegant figures. Characteristically, the room here is box-shaped with a tile-floor and coffered ceiling lit by rows of windows along the left wall. The general atmosphere is one of sumptuousness and luxury. Ornamental embellishments and decorative objects abound; hardly any space is left uncovered. There are elaborately carved pieces of furniture and doors, a floral frieze along the top of the walls, two colossal marble columns with composite capitals, and a sideboard with an ostentatious display of precious-metal plates and goblets on a dais beneath a canopy. With the exception of a large triptych with The Adoration of the Shepherds, the paintings - several landscapes and a flower painting reminiscent of those by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder or Balthasar van der Ast - are o f a type one would expect in a well-to-do Dutch household. Similar decorative features can ben found in all of Van Bassen’s palace interiors.

The effect of wealth and luxury is enhanced by the elegantly dressed men and women who seem to enjoy each other’s company. These staffage figures have been attributed to Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630). 28 pictures by Van Bassen with staffage by Van de Velde have been identified, all datable to the first half of the 1620s.

Unlike several other palace interiors by Van Bassen, this painting seems to be an uncomplicated Merry Company scene. Whether moralizing overtones should be read into it is a matter of debate. While the figures at the table in the left background are engaged in polite conversation, the general atmosphere is one of indulgence and idle pleasure; a wine cooler, richly festooned with wines, is on the right; the dandy in the foreground, clearly inebriated, enjoys the attention of two women; and a cushion and playing cards have been tossed to the floor. The company also includes a dog, a monkey, and a parrot. It has been proposed that these animals, which frequently occur in Van Bassen’s palace interiors, carry symbolic significance: among other qualities, loyalty is characteristic of the dog; vanity and lust are associated with the monkey, and an ability to imitate is a talent of the parrot.

In this painting an imaginary Gothic church interior is the setting for the tomb monument of William the Silent (1533-1584). Seen from the choir, whose stalls occupy the left foreground, the monument has been placed in the crossing, partially obscuring the view into the nave, To the right of the tomb the transept open into a side aisle or a chapel. The plain white walls and the absence of any religious imagery suggest that the church is a Protestant one. The man dressed in fine red attire in the foreground faces away from the viewer and toward the tomb, thereby drawing us into the scene, while other expensively dressed people casually walk about and chat. The figures have been attributed to Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630), with whom Van Bassen frequently collaborated.

The rendering of the interior - the central perspective, deeply receding space, and detailed description of the architectural details - is reminiscent of the Antwerp tradition of architectural painting as represented by Hans Vredeman de Vries, Hendrick van Steenwyck, and Pieter Neeffs the Elder. Their rigidly constructed interiors often appear to be airless boxes, However. While retaining the single-point perspective favoured by his Flemish colleagues, Van Bassen introduces light and atmospheric effects as means to articulate architectural space. Thus, the shadowed area in the foreground serves as a repoussoir to set off the crossing and the tomb, which is bathed in sunlight streaming in from the left transept. The right transept, with its northern light, is more softly lit, in contrast tot the brightly lit chapel or aisle beyond it. In the nave soft yet relatively radiant light counteracts the deep recession of the space.

It has been often observed that Van Bassen’s interiors appear more realistic than those of his Flemish predecessors. This is mainly a result of his realization that light and atmosphere are as important as perspectival systems for producing a convincing illusion of a three-dimensional space. The following generation of Delft architectural painters, such as Van Bassen’s pupil Gerard Houckgeest as well as Hendrick van Vliet and Emmanuel de Witte, developed this approach more fully after 1650.

The actual setting of the tomb of William the Silent is in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, where the monument stands in the choir and the seated effigy of the prince faces the nave. In the present painting Van Bassen has turned the tomb 180 degrees and enlarged it in relation to the church interior, thus making it a more awe-inspiring presence. The tomb has been commissioned by the States General in commemoration of the “Father of the Fatherland”, William the Silent, who had been assassinated at his residence, the Prinsenhof, in Delft, in 1584. Work on the mausoleum began in 1614, after designs by the Amsterdam architect Hendrick de Keyser (1565-1621). The tomb was finished only in 1623, by Hendrick’s son Pieter (1595-1676), three years after the date of Van Bassen’s painting. The picture is the earliest painted rendering of the monument. Since the figures on the top of the monument were never “in situ”, Van Bassen probably worked from designs or a model.