The interior of a church looking east, with elegant company in the foreground

Details

Gerrit Houckgeest (The Hague c. 1600-1661 Bergem op Zoom)
The interior of a church looking east, with elegant company in the foreground
signed 'G. Houckgeest, f.' (lower right)
oil on panel
32¾ x 42½ in. (83 x 108 cm.)

Special notice

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Sale room notice

We are grateful to Dr. Walter Liedtke for confirming the attribution, on the basis of photographs. Dr. Liedtke also dates the picture to the late 1630s, and compares it with Houckgeest's View of an imaginary Catholic Church (Nitze Collection, as mentioned in the catalogue entry) and the View through an Arcade (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland).

Lot Essay

Houckgeest is thought to have trained with Bartholomeus van Bassen. He entered the painters' guild in The Hague in 1625 but by 1635, the year of his earliest known dated work, had moved to Delft where he married the following year. His early output, which consists entirely of imaginary architectural views, is characterised by his use of a somewhat brownish tonality and deployment of small figures relative to the architectural space. This early, previously unpublished picture can be dated to the late 1630s and compares closely with his View of an imaginary Catholic Church, of circa 1638-40, in the collection of Dr. and Mrs. William A. Nitze, Washington (see W. Liedtke, in the catalogue of the exhibiton, Vermeer and the Delft School, New York and London, 2001, pp. 292-94, no. 35).

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