Pieter Jansz Saenredam

Pieter Jansz Saenredam (1597-1665) was born in the village of Assendelft. His father, Jan Pietersz Saenredam (1565-1607), an important late mannerist engraver and draftsman, died young in 1607, after which the family moved to Haarlem. Pieter began his artistic training on May 10, 1612, in Haarlem in the studio of Frans Pietersz de Grebber (1573–1649). After a ten-year apprenticeship, Saenredam became a master in the Saint Luke’s Guild in Haarlem in 1623. Although Saenredam is not recorded as ever having studied with a specialist architectural painter, his interest in architecture may have been encouraged by various painter-architects active in Haarlem, most notably Salomon de Bray and Jacob van Campen. A further contact that must have been important to the young artist was the mathematician and surveyor Pieter Wils. Soon after his apprenticeship with De Grebber, Saenredam began to produce the precise and restrained architectural compositions for which he is famous. The two main churches of Haarlem—Saint Bavo and the Nieuwe Kerk—were among Saenredam’s favorite subjects, although he also painted churches and cathedrals in a number of other cities, including ’s-Hertogenbosch, Assendelft, Alkmaar, Utrecht, Amsterdam, and Rhenen. His relatively small oeuvre consists of about fifty paintings, some 150 drawings, and a few prints executed early in his career.