DELEN, Dirck van

The painting is signed and dated lower right: D. van Delen 1629, and also dated above the door 1629.

The painting is signed and dated lower right: D. van Delen. f. 1633. It is also dated above central arch Anno 1633. Formerly the subject was interpreted as Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

Here, a seventeenth-century church provides the setting for a parable from St Luke’s Gospel (Luke 18:9-14) that contrasts virtuous humility and sinful pride. The Pharisee (a strict follower of Hebrew law) stands at the base of a column exalting his righteous way of life, while the publican (a tax collector) bows his head and prays for mercy.

Dirck van Delen specialized in painting architecture, occasionally collaborating with other artists for the depiction of figures. In this instance, he worked with the Dutch painter Cornelis van Poelenburch, who seamlessly blended the figures into this monumental interior. Such collaborations were a specialty of artists in the seventeenth-century Netherlands.

Dirck van Delen, sometime municipal official and burgomaster of Arnemuiden, painted church interiors and Renaissance palaces in the Vredeman de Vries and Steenwijck style.

A distinctive group of paintings in Van Delen’s oeuvre consists of imaginary palaces or elegant domestic interiors. These pictures are conceived like peepshows or perspective boxes: they open onto a view of opulent interior with staffage, in which skilfully applied rules of perspective, most spectacular in the ingeniously constructed coffered ceilings, play a dominant role. The present painting is a characteristic example of this type.

This painting is one of the many examples of Van Delen’s painting depicting imaginary buildings.

Dirck van Delen specialized in architectural subjects, in particular palaces and church interiors. Although the identity of his teacher remains unclear, the influence of artists such as Pieter Neeffs, active a generation earlier, and Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries, the Dutch father and son who worked at the court of Rudolf II in Prague, on van Delen’s art is indubitable.

This signed and dated panel depicts an imaginary church interior with a staircase, an organ, a tomb, and elegant figures, with a dog in the foreground.

Dirck van Delen specialized in architectural subjects, in particular palaces and church interiors. Although the identity of his teacher remains unclear, the influence of artists such as Pieter Neeffs, active a generation earlier, and Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries, the Dutch father and son who worked at the court of Rudolf II in Prague, on van Delen’s art is indubitable. Unlike his contemporary Pieter Saenredam, who was renown for his naturalistic paintings of existing buildings, van Delen specialized in imaginary architectural scenes that freely reinterpreted known interiors and emphasized dramatic spatial recession.

This painting depicts an interior scene with elegant figures playing music. The figures in the imaginary palatial interior were formerly attributed to Dirck Hals. However, they are very probably by Delen himself, modelled upon those painted by Hals in earlier joint works from the later 1620s.

Most of Van Delen’s paintings from the 1620s feature dark, rather rigid and angular, Renaissance-style architecture and usually include a vanishing point exactly in the middle of the painting. During the 1640s, the decade in which the present work was executed, Van Delen crafted a more monumental, simpler, cubic style, which was at once more somber and more coherent architecturally.

The Dutch painter Hans Vredeman de Vries, shortly before he died in 1604, published a book with engraved perspective inventions. This book, which was extremely important in transmitting the extensive Italian knowledge about perspective and architectural ornament to the north, influenced Dirck van Deelen. His painting “Palace Courtyard with Figures”, painted in 1635, reveals the dominant style in architectural painting in which van Delen continued to his death.

Van Delen’s painting shows the Great Hall of the Binnenhof in The Hague during the Great Assemby of the States-General in 1651,