Interior of a Catholic Church

In 1626 the Dutch Republic was a Protestant state, where Catholic worship was kept out of public view, in house churches. Van Bassen painted the opposite. His church is huge and Italianate. Red marble columns carry coffered vaults, and at a side altar a priest in a red-gold vestment is saying Mass. The building never existed. He assembled it from correct classical architecture, then filled it with people kneeling on the steps, two figures in brown habits walking down the nave and a small dog crossing the patterned floor. The signature and the date sit on the base of a pier at the right. The canvas later belonged to Princess Henriette Catharina, a daughter of the stadholder Frederick Henry, and passed down to Prince William V of Orange. In 1795 the French confiscated it and took it to Paris, and it came back to The Hague in 1816.