Bartholomeus van Bassen

Van Bassen painted imaginary buildings and then went out and built real ones. From 1638 he was city architect of The Hague, working on the town hall, on the Nieuwe Kerk from 1649, and on the Boterwaag, the butter weigh-house, in 1650. A decade earlier he had designed the Koningshuis, a summer palace for Frederick V, the Elector Palatine who had lost Bohemia and was living in exile in the Dutch Republic. The paintings run alongside all of that. Some are real places, like the interior of the Cunerakerk at Rhenen. Many more are invented palaces and churches assembled out of correct architecture that was never put up anywhere, with small figures walking through them so the scale reads. He kept a workshop and taught Gerard Houckgeest, who took the same subject to Delft and painted the real churches there.