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Notes
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Jan van der Heyden clearly enjoyed the discipline of painting very fine details. Although this is a very small picture, he has delineated many of the leaves of the trees individually. If you look closely at the grey roof of the church, you can see that he has used incredibly fine lines of black paint to suggest the patterns made by the tiles. But he also seems to have enjoyed the challenge of depicting entirely imaginary buildings and townscapes and making them seem real. This picture is almost certainly an example of his inventive streak – a fantasy composed of elements of different buildings that he had seen during his travels in Germany and Holland. The architecture of the church is typical of the mid-sixteenth-century Gothic of northern Germany.
Title
A Square before a Church
Date
1678
Medium
Oil on oak
Measurements
H 21.8 x W 28.9 cm
Accession number
NG1915
Acquisition method
Bequeathed by Sir James Morse Carmichael, Bt, 1902
Work type
Painting