Image Not Available
for Gerrit Houckgeest
Gerrit Houckgeest
Dutch, 1600 - 1661
Dutch painter. He was a nephew of the conservative portrait painter Joachim (Ottensz.) Houckgeest (b c. 1585; d before 13 June 1644), but he was probably a pupil of the architect and architectural painter Bartholomeus van Bassen at The Hague. Houckgeest joined the painters’ guild there in 1625. By 1635 he had moved to nearby Delft, where he was married in 1636; he was mentioned as a member of the local guild in 1639. In the same year he re-entered the guild at The Hague and in 1640 was cited as the designer of tapestries for the assembly hall of the States General there.
No picture by Houckgeest is known to date from before 1635, when he painted Charles I and Henrietta Maria Dining in Public (London, Hampton Court, Royal Col.). The composition represents a few dozen figures in an imaginary palace and is similar to van Bassen’s The King and Queen of Bohemia Dining in Public (1634; sold London, Sotheby’s, 27 March 1974). Other early works by Houckgeest, such as the Open Gallery in an Imaginary Palace (1638; Edinburgh, N.G.), also follow van Bassen in favouring arbitrarily arranged Baroque classical architectural elements on a monumental scale. As in the mostly imaginary Gothic church interiors painted in Antwerp by Houckgeest’s near contemporary Pieter Neeffs, Houckgeest used a central or somewhat off-centre vanishing point to draw the eye to the deepest area of space; full-length architectural forms in the foreground act as repoussoirs, creating the impression of a self-contained and inaccessible stage set. Houckgeest continued to paint imaginary palace views and church interiors during the 1640s. The precise draughtsmanship and local colouring in his work contrast with the tonal palette and the choice of real buildings as subjects in the work of another contemporary, Pieter Saenredam. However, Saenredam’s portraits of churches appear to have inspired a few of Houckgeest’s less conventional compositional schemes, such as the Imaginary Catholic Church (1640; The Hague, Schilderijenzaal Prins Willem V). Houckgeest’s church interiors of the 1640s reveal a gradual development towards more accessible space and more realistic qualities of light and atmosphere.
In 1650 Houckgeest shifted suddenly from depicting imaginary architecture to portraying the interiors of the Nieuwe Kerk and Oude Kerk in Delft. It appears likely that Houckgeest’s new approach originated in a commission, probably for the large panel Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft with the Tomb of William the Silent (1650; Hamburg, Ksthalle). The famous monument, an Orangist (royalist) and national symbol, was depicted by van Bassen in 1620 and by Dirck van Delen in 1645, in both cases in imaginary settings. Houckgeest, by contrast, represented the monument in situ, within the choir of the church, taking an oblique view through the colonnade from the ambulatory. He employed an expansive perspective scheme that seems to extend beyond the limits of the picture field. The near photographic fidelity of his architectural views dating from 1650 and 1651 may indicate that he used a ‘perspective frame’. This mechanical drawing device, familiar from treatises such as Samuel Marolois’s Perspectiva (Amsterdam, 1628), could have been used both to record the view and to determine the composition. Houckgeest also introduced a lighter and more uniform colour scheme, convincingly suggesting daylight and atmosphere.
Houckgeest’s new compositional scheme, consisting of a ‘two-point’ recession to the sides with a low horizon and usually a tall format, was applied again to the choir of the Nieuwe Kerk (e.g. two panels, both dated 1651; The Hague, Mauritshuis); to the Oude Kerk with the tomb of Piet Hein (as recorded in a copy by Hendrick van Vliet, Amsterdam, Rijksmus.); and to views centred on the pulpits of the two Delft churches. Fewer than a dozen views of actual church interiors from the early 1650s are known, but these pictures provided indispensable models for the early works of Hendrick van Vliet and Emanuel de Witte.
From 1653 until his death Houckgeest lived in the small port of Bergen op Zoom in North Brabant, where he painted an interior view of the local cathedral (1655; Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst), but this and his few late quayside scenes of imposing houses are in a distinctly retardataire style, perhaps because Houckgeest was closer to Antwerp than to any centre of Dutch art.
Walter Liedtke. "Houckgeest, Gerrit." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T039077 (accessed May 8, 2012).
Person TypeIndividual
