DIRCK VAN DELEN  (Heusden 1605 - 1671 Arnemuiden)

And CORNELIS VAN POELENBURGH  (Utrecht ? 1594/95 - 1667 Utrecht)

Interior of a Baroque Church with a Friar and Peasants

signed and dated on the column on the left: D van Delen fecit 1646
oil on canvas, 45 1/8 x 49 3/8 inches (114.5 x 125.5 cm)

Literature:
To be included in Bernard Vermet’s forthcoming catalogue raisonne on Dirck van Delen, as datable to c. 1645 and with figures by Cornelis van Poelenburgh.

In a large imaginary baroque church with tall heavy columns a long view through a central archway leads to a lighted crossing with decorated cupola and spandrels and finally, in the distance, to a large sculpted altarpiece.  In the foreground appears a seated woman with a baby and two nude children playing with a dog.  Other figures appear between the columns, including two peasants on the left, a partly clothed woman moving swiftly on the right, a man in a turban, and a friar in the center.  Overhead sculpted angels and genie decorate the arch, while oval windows offer glimpses of the adjacent gallery.

Dirck van Delen was born in 1604 or 1605 in Heusden, a small village near ‘s Hertogenbosch.  In August of 1625 he was living in Middleburg when he announced his betrothal to Maria van der Gracht, who was sixteen years his senior and the daughter of a burgomaster of Arnemuiden, a small town nearby.  In 1628 he succeeded his father-in-law as burgomaster and was referred to as such in documents of 1651-58, 1668-71, and also served as Consul of Zeeland.  There has been speculation about his teacher, who has sometimes been assumed to have been the little known Hendrick Aerts (Arts); van Delen copied a print after the latter’s art (see Hans Jantzen, Das Niederländische Architekturbild, 1909, 2nd ed. 1979, p. 67; and the authors of the exh. cat. Rotterdam, Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Perspectives, 1991, p. 97).  However Bernard Vermet observed (“Tableaux de Dirck van Delen, c.1604/05-1671 dans les musées français,” in Revue du Louvre, vol. 3, June 1995, p. 32) that none of Aerts’s works can be shown to postdate 1603, by which time Vermet believes that this painter from Malines had moved to Danzig.  Another candidate for van Delen’s teacher is Jan Steenwijk the Younger (c.1580-before 1649), whose influence and that of the circle of architectural painters in Antwerp who followed Hans (1527-before1609) and Paul (1567-before1636) Vredeman de Vries is very clear on van Delen’s first manner.  The earliest works by van Delen are dated 1626 and 1627 (however, see the painting from the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, the date on which is sometimes read as 1623; exh. Rotterdam 1991, no. 11) and already address his favorite architectural subjects, views of palaces and church interiors.  (On van Delen’s oeuvre, see Timothy Trent Blade, The Paintings of Dirck van Delen, University of Minnesota, dissertation, 1976.)

Most of his paintings from the 1620’s feature dark, rather rigid and angular, Renaissance-style architecture and usually include a vanishing point exactly in the middle of the painting.  Rarely would he attempt asymmetrical views in his early works.  During the 1630’s he abandoned the opaque browns and blacks of his first manner, introducing more subtle and transparent hues as well as greater tonal control.  From this point onward he would attempt to convey the range of the colors of marble gray-greens, tawny browns, light yellow, and a pale rose.  The majority of his mature paintings are scenes of palaces, often with courtyards and grand loggia, but he continued to paint imaginary church interiors while increasingly abandoning the Renaissance and Gothic styles for a Baroque or Classical order.

Van Delen joined the Middleburg guild in 1639 and was a member for many years thereafter.  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 artist’s first wife died in 1650 and he subsequently married two more times, leaving a memorial to his three spouses that is preserved in the Town Hall in Arnemuiden.  Van Delen was in Antwerp in 1668 and 1669 and joined the Rhetoricians’ chamber there known as the Olyftak.  His spouses’ monument confirms that he died on May 16, 1671 at age 66.  The inventory of his possessions not only attests to the fact that he had prospered in his careers, but also suggests that he was a well read gentleman who claimed more than two hundred volumes in his library, including classical as well as Dutch and French literature, history, theology, and a substantial collection of drawings and prints.

The present painting is a fine example of the artist’s mature style from the 1640s, when he painted a series of imaginary Baroque churches on an imposing scale.  Even the large and more squarish format of the canvas on which the work is executed seems calculated to enhance the impressive, even imperious effect of the architecture.  Details of the scene are borrowed from his own earlier works; for example, the two angels in the spandrels of the cupola in the middle distance, as well as the general effect of a monumental archway with receding corridor and lighted crossing, seem to be derived from van Delen’s own painting, Christ healing the Lame, dated 1636, in the Charitable Institutions, Middleburg (see, exh. cat. Utrecht, Centraal Museum, Saenredam, 1961, no. 228, ill.).  The figures in the present work are undoubtedly by Cornelis van Poelenburgh, who often collaborated with van Delen in the 1640s and 50s.  The curiously exotic cast of characters who comprise the staffage appearing abruptly between columns in an almost dreamlike fashion, evokes the aura of a theme from literature, but so far no specific subject has been identified.  Poelenburgh used van Delen’s fantastically grand church interiors to lend gravity to religious subjects in these years; see, for example, the Church Interior with the Parable of the Pharisee and Publican, signed and dated 1653 by van Delen and signed by Poelenburgh (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; see Nicolette C. Sluijter-Seijffert, Cornelis van Poelenburch (ca. 1593 – 1667), Enschede, 1984, p. 193, no. 78).

Van Delen’s works of the 1640s and 50s revitalized the tradition of fantastical architectural paintings that was born in Antwerp and practiced most creatively in the previous two decades in the Netherlands by Bartholomeus van Bassen (c.1590-1652) and van Delen himself.  However unlike van Bassen, van Delen never turned to the new Delft School style of naturalistic church interiors that appeared around 1650.  Instead he brought the imaginary church interior to its apogee with a new monumentality and perspectival clarity.  His works of these years attracted followers and imitators, primarily in the Southern Netherlands, such as Willem van Ehrenberg (1630-1676) and Jan-Baptiste van der Straeten (1685/6-1713/14).