View of the Choir of the Church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem with the Imaginary Tomb of a Bishop

By 1630 the great church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem had served the Reformed faith for half a century, and the city's Catholics could worship only in private houses. Yet in this view of its choir Saenredam put a bishop's tomb that never stood there. A dark figure of a bishop kneels on it at the far left, and the Latin inscription says that this bishop is marked out by right doctrine and holiness rather than by mitre and crozier, and that eternal glory awaits him after death.

The Louvre reads the invented monument as a claim that the Catholic bishopric of Haarlem had survived the Reformation, without the outward signs of office. The picture was probably made for a Catholic patron of noble family, and the Saenredam scholar Rob Ruurs wondered whether he came from the lords of Assendelft rather than the lords of Berkenrode. Signed and dated 1630, it is among Saenredam's earliest dated paintings, two years after the first. When it was sold in Rotterdam in 1810, the sale catalogue gave it to J. Saenredam, which is to say his father, the engraver Jan.