WITTE, Emanuel de

This painting is one of De Witte’s finest works of his Delft years. It can be compared with the panel of 1651 in the Wallace Collection, London, which shows the same pulpit from another position in the southern aisle of the Oude Kerk. In composition the picture bears a surprising resemblance to the artist’s early panel in Winterthur, considering that the two paintings depict dissimilar spaces in different churches. In both compositions an illusionistic curtain on the right is balanced against a dominant column on the left.

This church interior contains elements of the Oude Kerk and Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. The epitaph of Cornelis Johannes de Haan can be seen to the right.

Love of whites and lights, of elegantly described and delimited space is found in this uncharacteristically Italianate canvas by Emmanuel de Witte.

It was in the 15th century, that artists and architects began to make perspective studies for their own sake, inspired mainly by the book of Alberti on painting (1435). Alberti opened his book with an ingenious method for spatial construction based on central perspective. In the 16th century perspective study turned into perspective fantasies in the form of imaginary architecture, often highly elaborate, sophisticated and Mannerist. This interest in perspective and architectural ornament also caused the emergence of painters who began to specialize in this field. One of the inventors in this area was the Dutch painter Hans Vredeman de Vries. He influenced Dirk van Delen, whose follower was Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, one of the greatest master in this field.

Emanuel de Witte was also a great architectural painter. His interiors are always in use, they have a human atmosphere, in contrast with Saenredam’s paintings where, if human beings occur, they are small and not at all eloquent, they are just there to measure the spatial dimensions of the building, not to bring it to life as a building that is used.

Emanuel de Witte was born and trained in Alkmaar but had come to Delft by 1641 and joined the painters’ guild there in the following year. He remained in Delft for ten years but it was only at the end of his stay in the town, around 1650, that he began to paint the church interiors which form the greater part of his work. With his two Delft contemporaries, Gerard Houckgeest and Hendrick van Vliet, he developed this new type of subject-matter for painting.

They painted ‘portraits’ of the churches of Delft (and elsewhere), although they allowed themselves some leeway in the arrangement of individual architectural and other elements for compositional purposes. The tombs of the heroes of the Republic, notably those of Piet Hein in the Old Church and William the Silent in the New Church, were chosen as a patriotic focus for some of the compositions. Bright daylight, passing through the clear glass of the windows, illuminates the whitewashed interiors, with their tiled floors, memorial tablets and heraldic banners. Figures are glimpsed between the columns and in front of the tombs, not all of them treating their surroundings with appropriate reverence. In this painting the gravedigger pauses to gossip, while a man on the left sleeps, watched over by his dog. An aspect of his reserve is seen in his understated handling of the skull that is hardly visible in the shadowed debris of the open tomb.

Houekgeest seems to have been the innovator in this group of artists but De Witte, the greatest painter of the three, softened the harsh linearity of Houckgeest’s style. De Witte, unlike Houckgeest and Van Vliet, was a sensitive colourist, offsetting the severe black and white of the church interiors with patches of bright reds, yellows and greens. By January 1652 De Witte had moved to Amsterdam where he continued to specialize in church interiors.

It is a surprise to learn that the Interior of a Church in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (this picture) is one of de Witte’s compilations and not a view of a known building. The wooden ceiling and the little organ on the left are based on what de Witte saw at the Old Church in Amsterdam, the massive columns - but not their capitals - were modeled after the huge piers at St Bavo in Haarlem. The round arches and the late afternoon sunlight, which glows through the building, are purely imaginary. Distances are still clear, yet darkness will soon fall over this articulated play of forms. And de Witte not only could create majestic church interiors giving the convincing impression of reality; he also endowed them with a profound personal mood. His tonal design organizes the picture plane in a slightly geometrical fashion and substantially contributes to the articulation of the spatial effect. The movements and gestures of his figures are appropriate to the silence suggested by his dark interiors.

Emanuel de Witte concentrated on church interiors, but seems to have been more interested in the artistic effect. He was not concerned whether the interior was recognizable, and also abandoned a focused perspective, instead creating an impression of depth with the effects of light and shade.

The interior shown in the picture contains motifs from the Oude and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam.

Emanuel de Witte concentrated on church interiors, but seems to have been more interested in the artistic effect. He was not concerned whether the interior was recognizable, and also abandoned a focused perspective, instead creating an impression of depth with the effects of light and shade.

The interior shown in the picture contains motifs from the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam.

Standing between the massive chancel pillars, a man in a red cloak, a boy and a dog look diagonally into the central nave at the magnificent tomb of the national hero William I of Orange. An open grave with a skull in the foreground left suggests transience and the sacred location. In accordance with Calvinist custom, the church is practically bare of decoration, the Gothic architecture being embellished only by the tomb of William I, flags, the rhomboid coats of arms and memorial shield of the family, and the organ.

About 1650 the most interesting developments in architectural painting took place in Delft, where a new phase began with the church interiors by Gerard Houckgeest, Emanuel de Witte, and Hendrick Cornelisz van Vliet. Stylistic affinities with works done during the decade in the city by Carel Fabritius, Pieter de Hooch, an Vermeer are apparent, and Vermeer’s own exceptional masterpieces in this branch of painting can be viewed as part of the new movement.

In Saenredam’s earlier church interiors the line of vision is always at an angle of about 90° to the centre of the nave or to the wall of the building he depicts. Houckgeest had the new idea of shifting his position to the side to give an angle of about 45° to the principal axis of the church. The new position creates intriguingly intricate diagonal views across the church. Emanuel de Witte experimented with similar perspectival schemes about 1650. His earliest dated interior that employs the new point of view is the Interior of the Oude Kerk at Delft during a Sermon. It does not focus on a tomb of a hero, but on the minister preaching from a pulpit, which is still in place, to a large congregation. In de Witte’s painting the Word, not patriotism, is stressed.

This view of the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam is taken from the north aisle, looking west. De Witte seems never to have tired of painting Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, with its many chapels and recesses, and the dramatic lighting effects its vast windows imparted on the stonework. The present view is taken from the north aisle, looking west. The interior is enlivened with figures, giving it an anecdotal charm.

This view was recorded from the southern aisle of the Oude Kerk, looking to the northeast. The space covered by wood vaulting is the Mariakoor (Mary’s Choir). The luminous area in the left background, beyond the chandelier, is the Joriskapel (St George’s Chapel), where several years later the tomb of Admiral Maerten Tromp was installed against the bare white wall.

The two dogs draw attention to the grown men, one obviously aged; between them and the innocent youths, a lifetime may be measured. The irreverent dog spotlighted by the column is meant to be amusing (sextons routinely chased them out of churches throughout the Netherlands.

De Witte was born in Alkmaar, the son of a schoolmaster. He worked in Delft and entered the Delft guild in 1642. By 1652 he settled in Amsterdam where he spent the rest of his life.

In Amsterdam de Witte continued to paint views of Delft churches, but he was inspired more often by the metropolis’s grand buildings: its Old Church, lofty New Church, Stock Exchange, and, after it was consecrated in 1675, its Portuguese-Jewish Synagogue.

This synagogue was built between 1671 and 1675 for the Spanish and Portuguese (Sephardic) Jews who as of the end of the sixteenth century had settled in Amsterdam where they could profess their faith in relative freedom. In this respect the synagogue symbolizes the tolerant religious climate in the Republic of the United Netherlands. De Witte portrayed the synagogue during a service, with believers wearing hats draped with pale yellow talliths, or fringed prayer shawls. To the left of middle is the teba, or bimah (the platform in the middle of a synagogue from where the Torah is read), with on it the cantor and the parnas, or synagogue president, and against the back wall the Hechal, or Holy Ark.

It is known from contemporary sources that the synagogue was considered a sight worth seeing. This is confirmed in the present painting: most of the figures in the foreground are non-Jewish visitors.

The synagogue features more often in paintings, but only its exterior and as part of a city view. In so far as is known, De Witte is the only seventeenth-century painter to have portrayed the interior of this building. He did it at least three times.

Restraint is a quality that permeates de Witte’s genre pictures. In his richly furnished domestic Interior with a Woman at the Virginals the man in the curtained bed with his clothing and his sword draped over a nearby chair are not the first things noticed when we confront its palpable space, strong sunlight, and sonorous colour harmonies. If Mondrian saw the painting it is not hard to imagine that he would have nodded his head in approval at the banded pattern made by the light on the interior’s marble floor. His approval, however, would have been anachronistic if he did not correlate it with the artist’s effort to create a plausible illusion of space on the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Like other seventeenth-century Dutch artists, de Witte saw an inextricable link between a picture’s formal qualities and its illusionism.

De Witte was born in Alkmaar, the son of a schoolmaster. He worked in Delft and entered the Delft guild in 1642. By 1652 he settled in Amsterdam where he spent the rest of his life.

In Amsterdam de Witte continued to paint views of Delft churches, but he was inspired more often by the metropolis’s grand buildings: its Old Church, lofty New Church, Stock Exchange, and, after it was consecrated in 1675, its Portuguese-Jewish Synagogue. By the late fifties the contrast of light and shadow grows stronger and powerful, and he abandons oblique views for more frontal ones. At this time his interiors also become more fanciful. To be sure, other specialists made changes in the architecture they portrayed but de Witte was capable of radically rearranging it to increase massiveness, and to heighten spatial and chiaroscuro effects.

He also painted purely imaginary interiors of Catholic and Protestant Gothic and Renaissance churches, and designed others using elements taken from well-known Dutch buildings. But he always convinces us, in an uncanny way, that he has painted a view of a real church.

Comparison of this great artist’s works with those by Houckgeest and van Vliet shows his wider range, his more powerful spatial effects, and his more interesting pictorial qualities. In general, there is the same noble restraint as in Pieter de Hooch’s best genre pieces, Kalf’s mature still-lifes, and the grand solemnity of Ruisdael’s forest scenes.

De Witte, who is known mainly for his paintings of church interiors, painted this unidentified family in a richly furnished interior. The portraits are rather stiff, but the painting provides a treasure trove of information by depicting well-to-do burghers in ideal surroundings.

De Witte is known mainly for his paintings of church interiors. He painted this unidentified family in a richly furnished interior and he placed one of his existing painting on the wall in the background. This painting, which has a curtain to shield it from light and dust, depicts the interior of the Old Church in Amsterdam.

The expansion of Amsterdam’s trade in the mid-17th century allowed the city to develop its extant banking system and commodity exchange services to the highest level of volume and sophistication in Europe. In its Exchange, merchants and brokers from all over the world traded goods, currency, rumours - and an unprecedented volume of stocks. Contemporary reports sketch the bustle in the new Exchange building designed by Hendrick de Keyser (1565-1621), the most respected architect and sculptor of his generation. Artists such as Emmanuel de Witte painted the busy throngs of domestic and foreign traders.

In his church interiors painted for patrons who built or maintained the buildings, it is hard to find any reflection of the turbulent life of an artist who was an inveterate gambler with a contentious tendency. De Witte was obliged to use his paintings to settle his debts; left penniless, he took his own life in despair. His canvases are a complete contrast: full of majestic calm, a restrained yet resonant harmony, and a neat rhythm despite a complex linear structure.

It is interesting to compare this painting with Houckgeest’s painting of the same view in the Mauritshuis, The Hague. The man and boy on the left and a couple and child in front of the tomb were adopted from Houckgeest but are now less distant and isolated. The figures in the centre have become a second family with a young servant and greyhounds, one of them catching the other dog’s attention and a brilliant fall of light. The architectural motifs are obviously derived from Houckgeest.

Emmanuel de Witte is best known for his depictions of church interiors. Yet he also painted several city views, primarily of marker scenes. In this group he depicted chiefly fish markets, which is not surprising. Fish was a traditional foodstaff in the Netherlands, popular among all layers of the population, and its supply and sale were a familiar sight for seventeenth-century Amsterdam burghers.

In this painting a young fish seller is depicted in her stall. Displayed on the wooden table before her is a variety of fish, including salmon, codfish, haddock, and plaice. The architecture in the background locates this scene in the Nieuwe Haarlemmersluis, a lock in Amsterdam.

Within the genre of scenes of everyday life, Emanuel de Witte specialized in the description of public places, such as churches and markets. He uses a warm palette in a range of earthy-grey and brown tones and deploys interesting contrasts of light and shade.

Emmanuel de Witte is best known for his depictions of church interiors. Yet he also painted several city views, primarily of marker scenes. In this group he depicted chiefly fish markets, the present painting is the only known work by him featuring a poulterer’s stand.

In the nineteenth century this painting was ascribed to Pieter de Hooch.

When Delft painters depicted the tomb of William the Silent from various angles, they were often concerned with which of its sculptural figures fell into view. In this panel De Witte uses the columns, the curtain, and the narrow limits of view to focus attention upon the rear of the monument, which from this vantage point frames the bronze figure of Fame perched at the foot of the bier. The gentleman’s red cape, his gesturing hand, and a beam of light draw attention to the martyred prince. Two boys and the man’s attractive companion appear to absorb his words.

Although this panel dates from a period when Gerard Houckgeest, Hendrick van Vliet, and de Witte were continuously discovering new views of the Delft church interiors and their monuments, it still stands out as an extraordinary invention.

The painting is signed and dated lower right, on the column: E. De Witte A 1653.

De Witte began his career as a figure painter but later he decided to specialise in church interiors. However, even in this genre he continued to exhibit a remarkable interest in the human figure. Here he painted men, women, and children in the vicinity of the impressive tomb of William the Silent. Just as in other church interior paintings by Houckgeest and Saenredam, dogs run around the church. The painters were hereby drawing attention to an everyday situation that sometimes got out of hand.