Interior of a Protestant Gothic Church with Motifs from the Oude and Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam

Artist
Emanuel de Witte
Year
1677
Medium
Oil on panel
Dimensions
48 × 37 cm
Subject
Movement
Public Domain Rijksmuseum

Soaring stone columns and pale daylight define this church interior, in which Emanuel de Witte combined motifs drawn from the Oude and Nieuwe Kerk of Amsterdam into a single ideal space. De Witte freely rearranged and embellished real architecture in his interiors, and the result here is airier and more luminous than any single church could provide. A solitary figure, dwarfed by the architecture, gives scale to the procession of shafts and the fall of light across the aisle — the signature effect that made de Witte the leading interpreter of the Dutch church interior in the later seventeenth century.