A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

by Unknown

866. A STREET IN COLOGNE.

Jan van der Heyden (Dutch: 1637-1712).

Van der Heyden (or Heyde), who has been called, from the minute neatness of his workmanship, "the Dou of architectural painters,"[192] was one of the first Dutch artists to devote himself to that class of subject. It was a result no doubt of the Italianising tendency of the time. "It would seem that they required to be initiated in this style by the views of foreign market-places and squares with which the Italianising painters had decorated the saloons of Amsterdam, and that in the presence of this invasion of forums and piazzas they exclaimed, 'Have we not streets, squares, and monuments to paint?'" (Havard: The Dutch School, p. 238). Of course they had; and no works of the time are more interesting than these minute historical records. "A striking feature in Van der Heyden is the pencilling or dividing of the brickwork of the houses and walls by delicate white lines; so finely are these drawn that if it were not for the trouble, one might count the bricks in his buildings" (Seguier). But he had the art of combining this microscopic detail with breadth of effect. The division of labour in art work was in his time very fully applied; and Van der Heyden's range was very limited. He seldom turned his hand to anything but brick houses and churches in streets or squares, or rows along canals, or the moated granges common in his native country. He could draw neither man nor beast, and relied on Adrian van der Velde to enliven his street scenes with spirited figures. Van der Heyden was born at Gorcum, and was apprenticed to a glass-painter. He then moved to Amsterdam and studied architectural drawing. He visited England, Belgium, and the Rhenish Provinces. In the later part of his life he varied the practice of art with the pursuit of mechanics, for which he had a strong turn. He invented various improvements in the fire-engine, introduced the use of street-lamps, and at the time of his death was superintendent of the lighting and director of the firemen's company at Amsterdam.

In the background is seen the then unfinished tower of Cologne Cathedral surmounted by the old vane. This was a favourite subject of the painter; there is another version of it in the Wallace Collection. The figures are attributed to A. van de Velde.