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The interior of St Janskerk at Gouda
1662
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Measurements
- 110.0 × 128.7 cm
- Inscription
- inscribed in grey paint l.c.: H. (...illeg.) Vliet. / 1662
- Accession Number
- 4716-3
- Department
- International Painting
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1933
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited - Gallery location
- Rembrandt Cabinet
Level 2, NGV International - About this work
-
Church architectural painting was a highly specialised field in which a number of Dutch painters, including van Vliet, excelled. Each church had its own identity and local significance which the artist was expected to convey. This exquisite study of St Janskerk at Gouda is van Vliet’s only known painting of the sixteenth-century church, which is dedicated to St John the Baptist, patron saint of Gouda. The church’s austere interior reflects the iconoclastic stripping of sculptures and paintings undertaken by the Calvinists at the time of its acquisition in 1573. The open grave recalls John Calvin’s observation that the world is ‘but a tomb’.
- Subjects (general)
- Architecture Interiors Religion and Mythology
- Subjects (specific)
- arches churches (buildings) columns (architectural elements) Gouda (inhabited place) graves Netherlands (nation)
