Dirck van Delen

Dirck van Delen spent much of his career painting buildings that did not exist. His specialty was imaginary architecture: church interiors, palace courtyards and long perspectives assembled from the visual language of real buildings and prints. After about 1630, church interiors became less common in his work and elaborate palaces took over. The National Galleries of Scotland notes that these later façades grew lighter and more theatrical, with pink and white marble and Baroque sculpture. The elegant people inside them were often based on figures from Italian prints, and other painters sometimes supplied figures for his architectural scenes. Van Delen settled in Arnemuiden near Middelburg by the 1620s. The convincing space in his pictures was therefore frequently a construction of imagination rather than a record of an actual place.