Interior of the Sint-Odulphuskerk in Assendelft

Pieter Saenredam painted almost nothing but the insides of churches, and this one was his own. He was born in the village of Assendelft, and the Sint-Odulphuskerk is where his family belonged. He first sketched it as early as 1633, worked out the perspective in a drawing years later, and only finished the painting on the 2nd of October 1649. By then these old Catholic churches had long been whitewashed for Protestant worship, the walls bare and flooded with pale daylight, a small figure preaching from the pulpit. Look at the floor in the right foreground and you find the reason this church mattered to him. The gravestone lying there, carefully lettered, belongs to his father, the engraver Jan Saenredam.