The North Transept and Choir Chapel of Sint Janskerk, Utrecht

In 1636 Saenredam spent about five months in Utrecht, drawing its churches one after another. That same year the city founded its university, and the new institution took over a library that already sat inside one of those churches. Since 1584 the choir of the Janskerk, the church of Saint John, had housed the city library, built up from books confiscated from the religious houses after the Reformation, and from 1636 it served the university as well. It stayed there until 1820.

The Janskerk itself went back to the 11th century, one of the churches the bishops of Utrecht had founded around their cathedral in the shape of a cross. Saenredam looks here into its north transept, under pale ribbed vaults, with a wooden screen and a handful of small figures standing on the stone floor. He painted the panel in Haarlem in 1655, almost 20 years after the drawing it was based on. He made three paintings of this church. The other two are in Utrecht and Rotterdam.

This one is a promised gift from the Boston collectors Susan and Matthew Weatherbie, deposited at the Museum of Fine Arts.