Pieter Jansz. Saenredam

Step into a painting by Pieter Saenredam and you are usually standing in a tall, whitewashed church, nearly empty, its bare walls and columns washed in cool daylight. That plainness was recent history. Dutch Protestants had stripped the old Catholic churches of their images and colour, and Saenredam painted the scrubbed interiors that the reform left behind.

He worked mostly in Haarlem, and he did something new. Painters before him had invented grand fantasy architecture out of their heads. Saenredam went to real buildings, measured them, made careful drawings on the spot and dated them. Back in the studio he turned those studies into paintings, adjusting the perspective for effect while keeping the actual church recognisable. He is counted as the first artist to render existing buildings with that kind of topographical care.

By his own account he was small and sickly, and he gave nearly forty years to this one subject, the light falling through vast interiors onto pale stone. One of his views of the great church of St. Bavo in Haarlem, the city where he spent most of his life, hangs today in the National Gallery in London.