Church Interior

Before it ever reached The Hague, this small church interior hung in Whitehall Palace in London, in the King's Great Closet of James II. After James fled in 1688, his nephew and son-in-law William of Orange took the throne as William III, and around 1700 he sent it with other royal pictures to Het Loo, his hunting palace in the Dutch Republic. When William died, the English Crown claimed it back in 1702, yet it stayed at Het Loo, and the seal of his Dutch heir, Johan Willem Friso, is still on the back. An inventory of 1712 called it simply a little temple by Neefs.

Which Neefs is still an open question. The Mauritshuis, which shows it in the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague, gives it to Pieter Neefs the Younger. The Rijksmuseum, which owns it and has lent it since 1977, catalogued it in 2022 as a late work by his father, Pieter Neefs the Elder, from around 1655 to 1660. The church is an invented one, with a service going on far down the nave.