An architectural capriccio with an elegant couple strolling before a portico

A native of Middelburg, whose guild he joined in 1639, van Delen lived and worked in the nearby town of Arnemuiden, serving as its master of the toll-house and sitting almost continuously on its town council until his death. A specialist in architectural paintings, he initially trained under Frans Hals, whose work left no lasting impact on his young pupil. Though his earliest works were interior scenes executed in dark earth tones, around 1630 he began to create fanciful palace exteriors conceived in a palette composed predominantly of pinks and bluish greens. Like his contemporaries Bartholomeus van Bassen and Hendrick van Steenwyck II, van Delen freely mixed Gothic and Renaissance motifs to create a series of structurally impossible arcades and side chambers. In typical fashion, the arcade at right here recedes to a single vanishing point that draws the viewer’s eye to the atmospheric landscape of rectilinearly arranged trees visible in the background.
Though undated, Agnes Czobor has rightly associated this painting with the notably similar Architectural capriccio with the Return of the Prodigal Son, signed and dated 1649, in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne (loc. cit.). In his unpublished dissertation on the artist, Timothy Trent Blade suggested a slightly earlier dating of the mid-1630s to mid-1640s and attributed the figures to David Teniers II (loc. cit.), though they are likelier to have been executed by either Anthonie Palamedesz, with whom van Delen is traditionally thought to have collaborated, or van Delen himself.