Interior of a Protestant, Gothic Church during a Service

Sunlight falls through the tall windows of a bare Reformed church, over the pale plastered walls and the small congregation seated beneath a vaulting. Emanuel de Witte, the greatest of the Dutch church-painting specialists, signed and dated this interior in 1669, at the height of his powers. The empty whiteness of the Protestant nave, filled with cool, luminous daylight and a scattering of tiny figures, captures the austere beauty that made his church interiors the most admired of the genre — at once meticulous renderings of real Delft and Amsterdam churches and serene studies of light and space.