An Architectural Fantasy

To his contemporaries, Jan van der Heyden was famous not only as a painter but also as an inventor and entrepreneur whose activities had a major impact on daily life in Amsterdam. In 1669 he devised a systematic plan for lighting the city’s quays and streets using more efficient oil lamps in pole-mounted lanterns. In 1672 Jan and his brother Nicolaes developed a vastly improved fire pump with leather hoses that produced a constant jet of water, and soon after he established a manufacturing plant for the production of fire engines, which made him a wealthy man.

As a painter Van der Heyden specialized in cityscapes and country mansions. His images of refined elegance and prosperity convey the importance that the status-conscious urban elite of the Dutch Republic attached to owning a country estate. Van der Heyden’s technique was so meticulous that it seems he delineated every course of brickwork on his buildings. Despite such a devotion to detail, many of his architectural scenes, including this work, are pure inventions. Van der Heyden did paint numerous country estates in Holland, but this marble mansion appears to be a product of the artist’s imagination. While the classical structure echoes the buildings of Palladio and the decorative sculptural elements also reveal Italian influences, the figures, which were probably painted by Adriaen van de Velde (1636–1672), are unmistakably Dutch. The great house with its sunlit formal gardens may evoke an idealized world, but at the elaborate gateway of the brick walls surrounding the gardens, an elegant gentleman encounters a beggar with her baby. Much of the painting’s appeal arises from the contrast between the easy informality of the figures and the restrained formality of the architectural setting.