The Pieterskerk in Leiden

In the late 1830s, Johannes Bosboom painted several church interiors. They were so favourably received that he decided to concentrate on the genre. He dealt with church interiors not so much as religious settings, but as pictorial spaces. Initially he focused on the lavish interiors of churches in Belgium and the southern Dutch province of Brabant. The paintings are theatrical in their emphasis on the architecture of the building, the compositional use of foreground, middle-ground and background (reminiscent of the flats in traditional stage sets), and the use of historical costumes and eye-catching features like elaborate pendant light fittings and banners. In the way he employed light to model space, Bosboom was guided by the Romantic approach of Wijnand Nuijen. Following Nuijen’s lead, Bosboom constantly seeks ways to fill the church with light from some invisible source and so to underline the mystical ambiance of the scene, eventually at the expense of the linear depiction of the architecture with its heavy reliance on perspective. Between 1867 and 1871, Bosboom completed four major church interiors, of which this is one. The painting shows the nave and chancel of the Pieterskerk (St Peter’s Church) in Leiden with a service in progress. It is a fine example of the stylistic evolution described above.

Source: J. Sillevis, A. Tabak (eds.), Het Haagse School boek, Den Haag, Zwolle, 2001.