The Golden Bend in the Herengracht

Artist
Gerrit Berckheyde
Year
1672
Medium
Oil on panel
Dimensions
59.7 × 81 cm

The grandest stretch of Amsterdam’s Herengracht is seen from the west across the water, its double-fronted merchant mansions standing in crisp sunlit detail. Berckheyde painted this celebrated canal quarter repeatedly; here the patrician calm of seventeenth-century Amsterdam is fixed in a lucid, ordered cityscape.