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To his contemporaries, Jan van der Heyden was famous not only as a painter but also as an inventor and entrepreneur whose activities had a major impact on daily life in Amsterdam. In 1669 he devised a systematic plan for lighting the city’s quays and streets using more efficient oil lamps in pole-mounted lanterns. In 1672 Jan and his brother Nicolaes developed a vastly improved fire pump with leather hoses that produced a constant jet of water, and soon after he established a manufacturing plant for the production of fire engines, which made him a wealthy man.

As a painter Van der Heyden specialized in cityscapes and country mansions. His images of refined elegance and prosperity convey the importance that the status-conscious urban elite of the Dutch Republic attached to owning a country estate. Van der Heyden’s technique was so meticulous that it seems he delineated every course of brickwork on his buildings. Despite such a devotion to detail, many of his architectural scenes, including this work, are pure inventions. Van der Heyden did paint numerous country estates in Holland, but this marble mansion appears to be a product of the artist’s imagination. While the classical structure echoes the buildings of Palladio and the decorative sculptural elements also reveal Italian influences, the figures, which were probably painted by Adriaen van de Velde (1636–1672), are unmistakably Dutch. The great house with its sunlit formal gardens may evoke an idealized world, but at the elaborate gateway of the brick walls surrounding the gardens, an elegant gentleman encounters a beggar with her baby. Much of the painting’s appeal arises from the contrast between the easy informality of the figures and the restrained formality of the architectural setting.

Jan van der Heyden was born March 5, 1637, in Gorkum, the third of eight children. His eldest brother, Goris, was a mirror maker by trade, and Van der Heyden’s first training in art came from a local glass painter. The difficult—and irreversible—technique of painting images on the back of a sheet of glass enjoyed a certain popularity at the time, and several works of this type by Van der Heyden have survived. On June 26, 1661, in Amsterdam, he married Sara ter Hiel of Utrecht. He is known to have been a practicing artist at this time, and his earliest dated works are two drawn portraits of his brother-in-law Samuel ter Hiel and his bride, Jacquemijntje van der Passe, of 1659; his earliest dated painting is from 1663.

Van der Heyden’s oeuvre is composed largely of cityscapes and other depictions of groups of buildings, although he did paint about forty pure landscapes. Some of his works are relatively faithful depictions of an actual location, but many others are entirely imaginary architectural fantasies. Typically, his scenes are bathed in a brilliant, crisp light of almost unnatural clarity and characterized by remarkable attention to detail. Throughout his paintings, minute features are rendered with the greatest precision, and yet the artist seems never to have allowed this technique to interfere with the creation of a balanced and harmonious composition. The great skill with which Van der Heyden distributes areas of light and shade and his general mastery of subtle atmospheric effects are in no small way responsible for the coherence and unity of his works.

Although his artistic output was considerable, most documentary records of Van der Heyden’s life concern activities in fields totally unrelated to the arts. In 1670 he was appointed Amsterdam’s overseer of streetlights, and in 1673 he assumed responsibility for the city’s fire brigade. He was clearly greatly preoccupied with the problem of how to fight fires effectively, and, with his brother Nicolaes, devoted much time between 1668 and 1671 to inventing a new, highly successful water pumping mechanism. In 1679 he bought land on the Koestraat on which to build a house and fire-engine factory. In 1690 he and his eldest son, Jan, published a large illustrated book on the fire pump, entitled Beschrijving der nieuwlijks uitgevonden en geoctrojeerde Slangbrandspuiten.

When he died on March 28, 1712, Van der Heyden was a wealthy man and had in his possession some seventy of his own paintings. His influence on other seventeenth-century artists was relatively limited, but he was an extremely important source for architectural painters of the following century, both in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe.

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For earlier visit in 2024 see:

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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.

The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.

The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.

The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.

The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art

Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”

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