Gerard Houckgeest

In the mid-1630s Gerard Houckgeest, a painter from The Hague, showed Charles I of England dining in public with his queen and the young Prince of Wales, watched by visitors from behind a balustrade. The hall around them is almost certainly invented, and invented architecture was his trade. Trained by Bartholomeus van Bassen, a specialist in imaginary interiors, he painted grand churches and palaces that existed nowhere, and Charles I owned several of them.

Then, around 1650 in Delft, he painted a real building. His view of the Nieuwe Kerk, the New Church, with the tomb of William the Silent, leader of the Dutch revolt against Spain, looks across the church at an angle, between the columns, where earlier painters had looked straight down the nave. The viewer seems to stand inside the church. Within a few years Emanuel de Witte and Hendrick van Vliet, also in Delft, were painting the town's churches in the same oblique way. The Mauritshuis version of the tomb is dated 1651.

Houckgeest himself left Delft soon after. He had married into an influential Delft family, but by 1651 he had left for Steenbergen and then Bergen op Zoom, in the south of the Republic, where he died in 1661.