Church Interior

Emanuel de Witte

ca. 1670

Oil on wood

Seattle Art Museum

To meet the expanding art market of the seventeenth century, Dutch artists often specialized in new genres such as still lifes, landscapes, portraits and church interiors. In this invented interior, observe how De Witte uses light to create both architectural volume and a sense of spirituality. If you bring a different kind of attention to the image, you can watch it become a series of flat, overlapping rectangles, anticipating the twentieth-century abstractions of another Dutch painter, Piet Mondrian. Samuel H. Kress Collection Lady Cosmo Bevan (Marion L. Sulivan), Dorking, Surrey, England; Baroness Anne Beauclerk Dundas Dickson-Po