The Church of St Andrew in Düsseldorf

The white church at the centre of this street scene stood in a Catholic city on the Rhine, a long way from van der Heyden's Protestant Amsterdam. St Andrew's in Düsseldorf was begun in 1622 for Wolfgang Wilhelm, Count Palatine of Neuburg, a prince who had converted to Catholicism, and it served both the Jesuits and his court. Its two towers beside the choir went up in 1637.

Van der Heyden signed and dated the panel in 1667. The church is real, while the square and houses around it are at least partly his own arrangement, and the picture is sometimes called an imaginary view. By 1726 it belonged to a princess of the House of Orange, and in 1795 it was among the stadholder's paintings the French confiscated and sent to Paris, returning in 1815. The Mauritshuis owns it and hangs it in the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague. Half a century after it was painted, a burial chapel was added to the church, and Elector Johann Wilhelm, known in Düsseldorf as Jan Wellem, was laid there in 1716.