Church of Saint Cecilia, Cologne

Alongside Jan van der Heyden, Gerrit Berckheyde pioneered the townscape as an independent genre of painting in the third quarter of the seventeenth century and is today regarded as one of its leading exponents. Though the majority of Berckheyde’s townscapes depict the streets, squares and canals of local cities like Haarlem, Amsterdam and The Hague, he equally turned his brush to more distant places, including the German cities of Bonn, Heidelberg and Cologne. In the second half of the 1650s, Gerrit visited these and other German cities while traveling along the Rhine with his elder brother, Job, reputedly in the employ of Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg.

Berckheyde seems to have begun painting German townscapes only in the early 1670s. The present painting, which Cynthia Lawrence dates to circa 1673 (op. cit., p. 79), was painted only about two years after the artist’s earliest dated view of Cologne (Private collection; formerly, Christie’s, New York, 2 May 2019, lot 105). As with the townscapes by his contemporary van der Heyden, Berckheyde’s views are often capriccios, the various architectural elements deriving from drawings that the artist made while traveling through the Rhineland. Years later he assembled these structures into visually appealing, if not entirely topographically accurate, compositions.

On account of the sheer number of composite German townscapes in Berckheyde’s oeuvre, various ideas have been proposed as to their original audience. One suggestion holds that these paintings were made as souvenirs for Dutch tourists who had traveled in Germany. Another proposes that because Berckheyde’s German views only began to appear in the 1670s, a period that coincides with his increased production of views of Amsterdam, they may have been painted for customers in that city, and perhaps specifically for the city’s large and well-established German community (see C. Lawrence, op. cit., p. 78).

At left in this painting is the Church of Saint Cecilia, one of twelve Romanesque churches in the old city of Cologne. A church had stood on this site, formerly the ruins of a Roman bath, as early as the ninth century. In 965, Bruno the Great, archbishop of Cologne, earmarked funds for its completion. The original church was renovated in the twelfth century, turning it into a Romanesque structure. Though the church largely retains its original floorplan as a simple, three-aisled structure without transepts, today it lacks the tower and ridge turret seen in this painting and a similar but somewhat larger view on canvas in the collection of The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (fig. 1). Berckheyde’s depiction of the church in the Boston painting is a more-or-less accurate transcription of its appearance from the northeast, with a view into the Neumarkt. In the work of a little over a decade later in Williamstown, the church was removed from this setting, the sense of chiaroscuro intensified and the forms and shapes simplified in a manner that is consistent with the artist’s late style.

The building in the right background of this painting is St. Jakob, which also features in Berckheyde’s Cologne painting of 1671. Directly in front of this is part of the upper register of St. Martin in Bonn and in the right foreground a portion of the monastery building of St. Gereon (see H. Dattenberg, op. cit.).

A weaker repetition of this painting given to Job Berckheyde is in the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (inv. no. NK1702).